Do you enjoy reading and discussing the books you have read with friends? Are you one of the many people who have held your book club meetings online during lockdown? If so, you could be just the person we are looking for! Our partners in South Africa have come up with a brilliant suggestion for an e-volunteer placement. They already run reading circles for their staff, and they would love to meet a volunteer who would link up with them…
Just like a traditional volunteer placement, e-volunteering covers a wide range of formats – anything from making a simple to story video to a 12 week link-up with local people to share your skills. Listen to some of our e-volunteers talking about the work they have done. If you are interested in an e-volunteer placement take a look here: https://e-volunteer.co.uk/
We have always held regular volunteer socials – a way for volunteers to meet us, each other and any of our local partners able to attend. But what to do during lockdown? Like everything else, we decide to move our social events online – and what a successful move this turned out to be! ‘A very positive afternoon. It achieved what it set out to do, allowing those familiar with the projects to delve a little deeper and express their…
people and places and Treak (our partners in Cambodia) talk about resilience, opportunity and innovation on a webinar discussing volunteering during and post the pandemic. Click on picture below to watch the video ( Michael starts speaking 21.12 into the video – followed by Sallie) See if you can spot who the non-academics are!!!!
We are planning our next volunteer social in the next few weeks – it will be virtual and you will be able to meet previous volunteers, co-volunteers, our local partners from around the world and, of course, the people and places team – what a great way to pass a few hours this “lockdown” winter. We need your help to decide when and how we should do it – We would be really grateful if you would take just a…
The start of the vaccine roll-out! Of course, like everyone else, we are delighted and keeping our fingers crossed that all goes to plan and volunteers can start travelling again later this year. But that certainly will not mean the end of our e-volunteer programme. When we started creating opportunities for people to volunteer from home during 2020 it was of course in response to the pandemic – could we find a viable and useful way for volunteers to offer…
It’s January, the time of year when many people’s minds turn to travel plans – maybe a holiday – or maybe a volunteer placement! At the moment many people are ‘travelling the world’ via their computer screens – and you can volunteer in this way too without leaving the comfort and safety of your own front room. Visiting a tourist destination by viewing it online could accurately be described as ‘virtual travel’ – there’s no physical travelling involved. Similarly an…
A couple of weeks ago I decided to fill an idle couple of hours on a rainy Sunday afternoon filming a video which we could send to the education projects supported by people and places volunteers. Quite a lot of volunteers have contributed to this initiative – we have videos of stories, demonstrations of simple Science experiments, even a walk round a farm to show children the animals. But so far we didn’t have a video of a volunteer actually…
A number of people have contacted us suggesting they would like to travel with us as soon as possible. This is fantastic news, and we so want that too, BUT…current travel restrictions, (both for leaving the UK an other countries and entering the countries where our partner projects are located), make volunteering on site impractical at the present time. In addition, as our partner projects are in developing countries where health care facilities may not be the same as in…
We, at people and places highly value recognition from such prestigious awards as the WTM World Responsible Tourism Award. This year the judges decided to commend organisations and destinations which are taking responsibility and addressing the many challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic. We are particularly proud to have won The Innovation Award because people and places was conceived to innovate for better practice in the volunteer travel. We won the award for the work we are doing to develop support and encourage e-volunteering – a…