Staying Involved

Working at home to effect change can often be just as effective as volunteering overseas. While volunteering can give you direct experience and knowledge of the situation in developing countries, you can use that experience and knowledge to make your case much more effective at home as a solidarity worker. To be an effective campaigner, the first thing you should do is join a network so that you don’t have to go it alone. These networks usually organise campaigning events that you can join, as well as courses, talks and publications that can help educate you more and to which you too may be able to contribute. Comhlámh is one such network.

Other solidarity and campaign groups exist throughout Ireland that maintain contacts between Ireland and particular regions (country-specific groups), and that campaign on particular issues (issue-specific groups). There are also local One World centres around the country that promote development education and campaigns, which you can join. See Comhlámh’s Index list on our website.

Personal decisions:

There are some more personal decisions you can take to help improve conditions in developing countries. Firstly, you can buy fair trade products, thus ensuring that communities receive a fair price for their produce. If you buy ethical products you are guaranteeing fair prices, good working conditions and pro-environment production methods. You can also participate in organisations devoted to making ‘regular’ trade fairer, by helping monitor companies which exploit labour or damage the environment. You can also make your life simpler by reducing the amount of possessions you have, eating more simply, and travelling more ecologically by bike, walking or with public transport.

Fundraising:

Many people may have fundraised to help you pay for your time spent volunteering overseas. Don’t forget that you have a duty to those who helped fund you. Many of the activities mentioned above, such as giving public talks and talking to the local media are part of your giving back to the community that helped you. However, you can also make a direct impact by becoming a volunteer fundraiser for international development organisations, your sending organisation or for projects of the organisation/project you worked with in your host country.

Whatever you decide to do, remember that what you choose to do when you get home may be even more valuable than what you did while overseas. Volunteering overseas is part of a continuum that encompasses the point when you first decide to go to a developing country, to your activism when you get home. Former overseas volunteers have summed up one aspect of the coming home process by saying that “commitment doesn’t end at the airport”. Volunteering overseas, therefore, can be seen not so much as an end in itself but the beginnings of a new way of looking at the world and a new means to interact with it in order to bring about change.