Responsible Volunteering Statement

HeyLocals exists to make it possible for volunteers to spend meaningful time with communities that have asked for support — and to do so without causing the kind of harm that the volunteer-travel sector has, at times, been rightly criticised for.

We think most of that criticism has been fair. The voluntourism industry grew fast, in some cases too fast, and some of what it produced — children rotated through orphanages to entertain foreign donors, unqualified volunteers allowed to teach or treat patients, marketing built on images of poverty rather than images of dignity — damaged the very people it claimed to help.

This statement sets out, in plain terms, how we try to do this differently. It is not a promise that we get everything right. It is a commitment to specific standards, a commitment to be honest when we fall short of them, and an invitation to you — volunteers, partners, parents, journalists, critics — to hold us to account.

We operate as a Società Benefit under Italian Legge 208/2015 — the Italian equivalent of a US Benefit Corporation or a UK B Corp. That means the pursuit of positive social and environmental impact is not a marketing claim but a binding element of our corporate purpose, reported on annually through a public relazione d’impatto. This statement is one part of how we describe, openly, what that commitment looks like in practice.

In 2017, the UK became the first country in the world to formally recognise orphanage trafficking as a form of modern slavery. The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Orphanage Trafficking, the ReThink Orphanages coalition, Lumos, Save the Children, Better Care Network and others have, over the last decade, built a clear consensus: children belong in families, not in institutions built to receive foreign volunteers and donations.

More than 80% of the estimated 5.4 million children living in orphanages worldwide have at least one living parent. Many were placed in residential care because a volunteer programme, a donor flow, or a tourist visit made it financially viable to keep them there. The well-intentioned visitor is, in that system, part of the demand.

The consensus now — from UNICEF, from the UN Guidelines for Alternative Care (endorsed by the General Assembly), from UN Resolution 74/133 (2019), and from responsible operators across the sector — is that short-term, rotating foreign volunteers should not be working in residential care for children, full stop.

We accept that consensus. This statement explains what it means for how we build our programmes.

1. Children belong in families, not in institutions

We do not offer placements in residential orphanages. We do not send volunteers to children’s homes, boarding institutions, or any setting where children are separated from their families for the purpose of receiving foreign visitors.

Where we work with vulnerable children — and we do, in school support, day-care, community education, disability support, and hospital settings — we work alongside children in their families, schools and communities. Every placement we offer is designed around that principle.

We audit our own programme against this principle every year. If a project fails the test, we remove it — even if it is commercially successful.

2. Skills match: you do what you are qualified to do

A gap-year volunteer is not a qualified teacher. A medical student is not a doctor. A weekend construction enthusiast is not a licensed builder.

This is obvious, and yet the voluntourism sector has, historically, been very bad at enforcing it. We try to take it seriously.

• Teaching placements are support roles. You assist a qualified local teacher. You do not run a classroom, design a curriculum, or teach a subject you are not competent in. English-language support is structured around the school’s own programme, not yours.
• Medical and healthcare placements are, for non-professionals, observational and support-based only. You do not perform any clinical procedure that you would not be permitted to perform at home. For qualified professionals (medical students, nurses, doctors, midwives, physiotherapists), the scope is defined project-by-project in writing and must be signed off by both you, the host facility and your training institution where relevant. In no country will you be asked or allowed to practise beyond your registered competence, regardless of what local rules might technically permit.
• Construction projects exist to support, not to substitute for, local skilled labour. The people who do the technical work on our construction sites are local tradespeople who are paid to do it. Volunteers provide supplementary, unskilled labour, and are supervised on site.
• Childcare and early-years placements are support roles under the direct supervision of trained local staff. You are an extra pair of hands for the people who actually know the children, not a replacement for them.

3. The community leads; we follow

Every project we run started with a local organisation identifying a need and asking for support. We have never imposed a project on a community.

This matters in practical ways:

• The daily activities on your placement are set by the partner organisation, not by you. If they ask you to help sort books in the library rather than teach a lesson on Tuesday morning, that is because they know what they need that day better than you do.
• Our partners are paid for the work they do — coordinating, hosting, supervising. A fair share of every volunteer fee stays in-country, funds local salaries, and supports the organisation’s year-round activity (which carries on long after any individual volunteer has left).
• We do not own the projects. We partner with organisations that would exist whether HeyLocals did or not. If HeyLocals disappeared tomorrow, every project we work with would carry on.

4. Honest money

Voluntourism has a long history of opaque pricing — a four-figure fee for a week’s placement with no indication of where the money goes, implied promises of donations that never materialise, and glossy brochures that obscure the fact that most of the fee stays in the sending country.

We try to break that pattern. On request, and before any volunteer books, we will show you:

• What percentage of your fee goes to the in-country partner;
• What percentage covers your accommodation, food, transport, and in-country coordination;
• What percentage covers HeyLocals’ own operational costs, marketing and staff;
• What, if anything, contributes to a direct project fund.

We do not make vague promises that “a portion of your fee supports the children.” If a specific partner project has a specific funding need, we say so, say how much, and say what it is for.

5. Honest marketing

Here is what you will not find on heylocals.co.uk, on our social media, or in anything we publish:

• Identifiable photos of children used to sell placements;
• “Before/after” imagery designed to suggest that volunteers rescued anyone;
• Captions that play on pity, exoticism or “saviour” tropes;
• Quotes from children that cannot be verified or that were given under unequal circumstances;
• Images of children in distress, undress, or medical vulnerability;
• Location pins on images that could allow identification of a specific child or school.

We will make mistakes on this — everyone in this sector does, and our archive is not perfect — and we would genuinely like to hear from you if you spot a problem. See How to hold us accountable, below.

6. Long relationships, not short transactions

Most of our partner organisations have been working with our parent brand, HeyLocals, for years. Some since we started. Short-term volunteer rotation is, by its nature, disruptive: people turn up, form attachments, leave again. The only way to make that non-harmful for children and communities is to make sure that the institutional relationship between us, the partner and the community is stable, even if the individual volunteer passing through is not.

This is why we do not sign up a new country just because it is popular, add a new partner just because they offered, or open a new project just because a volunteer asked.

Orphanages and residential-care volunteering

We do not offer this. We will not offer this. If you ask us to place you in a children’s home, an orphanage, or any residential-care institution for children, we will say no, and we will explain why.

We recognise that there are edge cases — specialist disability care, transitional-care facilities, emergency settings — where international engagement can be appropriate, and where withdrawing it might cause more harm than continuing. The UN Guidelines for Alternative Care allow for these. We apply a very high bar to any such placement, do not place short-term rotating volunteers in direct caregiving roles in them, and do not currently have any such placements in our portfolio.

If you are researching this issue, we recommend reading:

• Modern-Day Orphans: The Truth About Orphanage Tourism (Better Care Network)
• The UK All-Party Parliamentary Group on Orphanage Trafficking
• Lumos’s Global Ending Institutionalisation work
• The Australian government’s Smart Volunteering guidance

Wildlife and animal-welfare placements

Animal-welfare voluntourism has its own well-documented problems — captive-elephant tourism, cub-petting, canned breeding, and “sanctuaries” that are anything but.

For any placement involving animals, we require partners to meet the following minimum standards:

• No riding, bathing on demand, or performance by captive wildlife for tourist entertainment;
• No direct hand-rearing or handling of infant wild animals by volunteers where this causes habituation and compromises release or welfare;
• Transparent sourcing: animals on the project are there because they are rescues, rehabilitation cases, or part of a managed conservation programme — not purchased or captured to satisfy tourist demand;
• Release-first conservation: where species-appropriate (e.g. sea turtles, birds of prey), the default is rehabilitation and release, not permanent captivity;
• Alignment, where applicable, with Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries (GFAS) standards, the World Animal Protection guidance on captive wildlife in tourism, and local conservation-authority requirements.

For our current elephant project in Koh Samui, this means: no riding, no chains during the volunteer day, welfare-led husbandry, and the volunteer’s role is defined around enrichment, food preparation and habitat maintenance — not performing with the animals for photos. If you book that placement and find that what you see on the ground differs from what we have described here, we want to hear from you immediately.

Medical, healthcare and hospital placements

UK students are increasingly drawn to international medical electives. There is real value in these, and there is also a documented history of harm when boundaries blur. Our line is simple:

• If you are a pre-clinical or non-qualified participant, you observe and assist. You do not perform clinical procedures.
• If you are a qualified or clinical-years student, the scope of your role is written down in advance, signed off by you and the host facility, and limited to what you would be permitted to do, supervised, at home.
• You do not take photographs of patients. You do not discuss cases outside the clinical team. You do not share anonymous-seeming anecdotes that would breach confidentiality if your supervisor read them.
• Patient dignity comes first. Always.

Teaching placements

You are there to support a qualified teacher, within their plan. You are not there to run a class on your own, “introduce” a subject you are not trained to teach, or test educational theories on children who have no say in the matter. If a partner asks you to do something that feels outside the remit of “supplementary support to a qualified local teacher,” tell us.

Construction and physical projects

Skilled construction tasks are done by local, paid tradespeople. Volunteer contributions are on the unskilled, supervised side of the work. Nobody operates power tools or machinery they are not trained for. Safety equipment (boots, gloves, hard hats where relevant) is provided and is not optional.

Volunteering in communities poorer than your own

A considerable body of post-colonial scholarship — and a fair bit of honest reflection from within the sector — has pushed operators to think harder about the implicit assumptions in sending largely white, largely Northern-European volunteers to largely non-white, largely Global-South communities.

We don’t have a neat answer to this, and we are suspicious of anyone who says they do. What we try to do:

• We ask our partners — not ourselves — to define what they actually need from visiting volunteers. Sometimes the most useful role is surprisingly modest.
• We prepare volunteers, before departure, with honest context about the country, its history (including, where relevant, its colonial history with the UK and Europe), and the limits of what a short-term visitor can contribute.
• We try to tell the story of each community in its own terms, not as a backdrop for a volunteer’s personal-growth narrative.
• We welcome criticism when we get this wrong.

Responsible volunteering is not a checklist we impose on you; it is a partnership. From our side, we commit to the standards set out above. From your side, we ask:

Before you book:

• Read this statement and our Safeguarding & Child Protection Policy and DBS Check Policy. If you disagree with anything in them, tell us — either way, we want you to know what you are signing up to.
• Be honest with us about your skills, your motivations, and anything in your past that might be relevant to a role working with children or vulnerable adults.
• Choose a placement you are actually suited to. If you want to help but are not sure what role fits, call us. Sometimes the right answer is “this isn’t the placement for you” — and we will tell you that.

Before you travel:

• Complete the pre-departure safeguarding and cultural-orientation training we send you.
• Obtain the criminal-records certificate appropriate to your country of residence, as required by our DBS Check Policy.
• Sign our Code of Conduct.
• Read the destination-specific guide for your country.

During your placement:

• Follow the partner’s lead on activities, not your own plan.
• Apply the two-adult rule around children at all times.
• Never photograph children without explicit permission, and never post images of identifiable children to your own accounts.
• Do not exchange personal contact details with children, and do not promise anything we cannot guarantee.
• Raise concerns — no matter how minor they feel — with your in-country coordinator or directly with our Designated Safeguarding Lead.

After you return:

• Be honest in your feedback. If something on the ground did not match what we described here, tell us. You can email the DSL, use our complaints procedure, or — if you feel unable to come to us directly — raise a concern with an external body like the NSPCC, ECPAT or Better Care Network.
• Think carefully before you post. Social-media stories shape who books next, and shape how children are represented online for years. A thoughtful post is more useful than a dramatic one.
• Do not keep up private contact with individual children you met on your placement. If you want to support the project long-term, we can tell you how.

To make the boundaries unambiguous, here is a plain-English list of things we will not do — regardless of what a potential volunteer, partner or commercial pressure might suggest:

• Place volunteers in residential orphanages or children’s homes.
• Offer “cuddle-the-baby” or “hug-an-elephant-calf” placements of any kind.
• Allow unqualified participants to perform clinical procedures.
• Allow unqualified participants to teach a class alone or unsupervised.
• Sell a placement on the basis of imagery that identifies a specific child.
• Promise a volunteer that they will “make a difference” on a timeline that is not plausible given what they will actually be doing.
• Take on a new partner without formal safeguarding due diligence.
• Pay a partner in cash off-record, or engage in any practice that obscures how volunteer fees are distributed.
• Retaliate against a volunteer, staff member, partner, or child who raises a concern in good faith.

Saying these things in a public statement only matters if you can check whether we mean them. Here is how:

Ask us, before you book:

• Ask for the breakdown of where your fee goes.
• Ask to see our Safeguarding Policy, our DBS Check Policy, our Code of Conduct, and the Partner Safeguarding Agreement we use with in-country partners.
• Ask for the name and professional background of the Designated Safeguarding Lead.
• Ask for references — previous volunteers on the same project.
• Ask us anything about a specific project that the public pages do not answer.

If any of those questions are met with a vague answer, treat it as a red flag — with us or with any operator.

Tell us when we fall short:

• To the Designated Safeguarding Lead for safeguarding-related matters: [email protected].
• Through our complaints procedure (see the Safeguarding Policy) for any other matter.
• By post to our UK correspondence office: WeWork, Aviation House, 125 Kingsway, London WC2B 6NH.
• By post to our Italian registered office: ACL Travel S.r.l., Piazza Durante 24, 20131 Milano, Italy.
• By certified email (PEC): [email protected].
• Anonymously and externally, if you prefer, to the NSPCC (UK — 0808 800 5000), Childline (UK — 0800 1111), Telefono Azzurro (Italy — 19696), Emergenza infanzia (Italy — 114), or — for international child-protection concerns — ECPAT International ([email protected]).

Where we publish our commitments and our performance:

• This statement (reviewed annually).
• Our annual safeguarding summary, available on request.
• Our annual relazione d’impatto under Legge 208/2015 (Società Benefit), which reports on our social and environmental performance.
• Any material change in our policy or our programme is published on the site.

This statement and our wider programme align with the following:

• UN Convention on the Rights of the Child
• UN Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children (2009) and UN Resolution 74/133 (2019)
• UK Working Together to Safeguard Children (current edition)
• Keeping Children Safe in Education (used as a reference standard for good practice)
• The Code for the Protection of Children from Sexual Exploitation in Travel and Tourism (ECPAT / “The Code”)
• ReThink Orphanages coalition principles
• Better Volunteering, Better Care research and recommendations
• Keeping Children Safe International Child Safeguarding Standards
• World Animal Protection guidance on wildlife in tourism
• Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries (GFAS) standards (where applicable)
• ABTA animal-welfare and responsible-tourism guidelines
• Legge 208/2015 (Italy) — Società Benefit reporting framework

Where sector-wide standards evolve — as they have done and will continue to do — we evolve with them.

Responsible volunteering is not a solved problem. Some of the sharpest criticism of the sector, from researchers, journalists and former volunteers, applies in some degree to everybody who operates in it, including us. We do not think the right response to that criticism is to ignore it, or to dress a commercial product in the language of charity.

We think the right response is:

• To design programmes around the principle that children belong in families and that communities know their own needs better than visitors do;
• To make our standards public, specific and checkable;
• To be honest when we fall short;
• To keep changing our practice as evidence accumulates;
• To treat volunteers as adults capable of understanding the trade-offs and making their own informed choices.

That is what this statement is for. Read it. Test it. Ask us about it. And if, at the end of that, you decide to travel with us — you will know what we stand for and what we ask of you in return.