Download or read book Wide Open World written by John Marshall and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2015-02-10 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For readers of Three Cups of Tea; Eat, Pray, Love; and Wild comes the inspiring story of an ordinary American family that embarks on an extraordinary journey. Wide-Open World follows the Marshall family as they volunteer their way around the globe, living in a monkey sanctuary in Costa Rica, teaching English in rural Thailand, and caring for orphans in India. There’s a name for this kind of endeavor—voluntourism—and it might just be the future of travel. Oppressive heat, grueling bus rides, backbreaking work, and one vicious spider monkey . . . Best family vacation ever! John Marshall needed a change. His twenty-year marriage was falling apart, his seventeen-year-old son was about to leave home, and his fourteen-year-old daughter was lost in cyberspace. Desperate to get out of a rut and reconnect with his family, John dreamed of a trip around the world, a chance to leave behind, if only just for a while, routines and responsibilities. He didn’t have the money for resorts or luxury tours, but he did have an idea that would make traveling the globe more affordable and more meaningful than he’d ever imagined: The family would volunteer their time and energy to others in far-flung locales. Wide-Open World is the inspiring true story of the six months that changed the Marshall family forever. Once they’d made the pivotal decision to go, John and his wife, Traca, quit their jobs, pulled their kids out of school, and embarked on a journey that would take them far off the beaten path, and far out of their comfort zones. Here is the totally engaging, bluntly honest chronicle of the Marshalls’ life-altering adventure from Central America to East Asia. It was no fairy tale. The trip offered little rest, even less relaxation, and virtually no certainty of what was to come. But it did give the Marshalls something far more valuable: a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to conquer personal fears, strengthen family bonds, and find their true selves by helping those in need. In the end, as John discovered, he and his family did not change the world. It was the world that changed them. Praise for Wide-Open World “Marshall’s use of rich details locates readers firmly in each time and place, enabling them to sense the adventure, wonder and joy he experienced in his surroundings and in watching his children grow into hardworking, more responsible teens, as well as the frustrations and disappointments he and his family inevitably encountered along the way. A great armchair adventure that should inspire others to consider voluntourism as a way to help others and see the world.”—Kirkus Reviews “Each new location combines beautiful scenery with a dose of sentiment, a good deal of humor, and some heartfelt consideration of the human condition. . . . His philosophy may not fit everyone and the ending is bittersweet, but this is an enticing call to service.”—Publishers Weekly “Wide-Open World is an adventure made up of countless small moments of human connection. It’s an armchair travelogue that may well inspire you to do good off the beaten path.”—BookPage “For anyone who has ever imagined what it would be like to pack up, unplug, pull the kids out of school, and travel around the world, this volunteer adventure is your ticket. Wide-Open World will move, engage, and inspire you, even if you never leave the couch.”—Christina Baker Kline, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Orphan Train

Download or read book The 100 Best Volunteer Vacations to Enrich Your Life written by Pam Grout and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a broad spectrum of volunteering possibilities, spanning six continents and a hundred different opportunities ranging from archaeology and tourism to humanitarian aid and conservation.

Download or read book Volunteer Vacations written by Bill McMillon and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2009-02 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the increasing number of people looking for ways to make a difference while on vacation, this fully updated edition is filled with in-depth information to get them ready for their adventure, including contacts, locations, costs, dates, project details, and profiles of 150 select organizations that run thousands of programs in the United States and around the world. Including new details about long-term projects and organizations specifically tailored for families, seniors, and people with disabilities, this definitive sourcebook provides a wealth of opportunities for anyone interested in taking a truly meaningful vacation and provides new anecdotes about all kinds of jobs and the positive impact they had on volunteers' lives.

Download or read book Hoping to Help written by Judith N. Lasker and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-19 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Overseas volunteering has exploded in numbers and interest in the last couple of decades. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people travel from wealthier to poorer countries to participate in short-term volunteer programs focused on health services. Churches, universities, nonprofit service organizations, profit-making "voluntourism" companies, hospitals, and large corporations all sponsor brief missions. Hoping to Help is the first book to offer a comprehensive assessment of global health volunteering, based on research into how it currently operates, its benefits and drawbacks, and how it might be organized to contribute most effectively. Given the enormous human and economic investment in these activities, it is essential to know more about them and to understand the advantages and disadvantages for host communities. Most people assume that poor communities benefit from the goodwill and skills of the volunteers. Volunteer trips are widely advertised as a means to "give back" and "make a difference." In contrast, some claim that health volunteering is a new form of colonialism, designed to benefit the volunteers more than the host communities. Others focus on unethical practices and potential harm to the presumed "beneficiaries." Judith N. Lasker evaluates these opposing positions and relies on extensive research—interviews with host country staff members, sponsor organization leaders, and volunteers, a national survey of sponsors, and participant observation—to identify best and worst practices. She adds to the debate a focus on the benefits to the sponsoring organizations, benefits that can contribute to practices that are inconsistent with what host country staff identify as most likely to be useful for them and even with what may enhance the experience for volunteers. Hoping to Help illuminates the activities and goals of sponsoring organizations and compares dominant practices to the preferences of host country staff and to nine principles for most effective volunteer trips.

Download or read book 700 Places to Volunteer Before You Die written by Nola Lee Kelsey and published by Dogs Eye View Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering the most diverse listing of global volunteer projects available, this definitive guidebook on “voluntourism” includes tips from industry leaders, advice from renowned travel writers and serial volunteers, and coverage of issues facing volunteer travelers. Along with detailed project descriptions of more than 750 global philanthropic travel opportunities, this guide also provides an extensive index of projects comparable at a glance by skill, region, and type of travel. A unique introduction to awe-inspiring possibilities, it presents options and inspirations for every style of traveler: budget, families, teens, humanitarian, wildlife, education, conservation, builders, and business.

Download or read book Best of All written by Linda L. Graff and published by Dundas, Ont. : L. Graff and Associates. This book was released on 2005 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The LAST Virtual Volunteering Guidebook written by Jayne Cravens and published by Energize, Inc.. This book was released on 2014-01-15 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is virtual volunteering? It’s work done by volunteers online, via computers, smartphones or other hand-held devices, and often from afar. More and more organizations around the world are engaging people who want to contribute their skills via the Internet. The service may be done virtually, but the volunteers are real! In The LAST Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, international volunteerism consultants Jayne Cravens and Susan J. Ellis emphasize that online service should be integrated into an organization’s overall strategy for involving volunteers. They maintain that the basic principles of volunteer management should apply equally to volunteers working online or onsite. Whether you’re tech-savvy or still a newbie in cyberspace, this book will show you how to lead online volunteers successfully by: -Overcoming resistance to online volunteer service and the myths surrounding it; -Designing virtual volunteering assignments, from micro-volunteering to long-term projects, from Web research to working directly with clients via the Internet; -Adding a virtual component to any volunteer’s service; -Interviewing and screening online volunteers; -Managing risk and protecting confidentiality in online interactions; -Creating online communities for volunteers; -Offering orientation and training via Internet tools; -Recruiting new volunteers successfully through the Web and social media; and -Assuring accessibility and diversity among online volunteers. Cravens and Ellis fervently believe that future volunteer management practitioners will automatically incorporate online service into community engagement, making this book the last virtual volunteering guidebook that anyone has to write!

Download or read book Worldwide Volunteering written by and published by How To Books Ltd. This book was released on 2004 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book demonstrates the enormous range of opportunites that exist around the world. There is something for everyone. - from the Foreword by Richard Branson

Download or read book Creating Opportunities written by John Christopher Snyder and published by Hilborn. This book was released on 2018-04 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Creating Opportunities is an inspiring roadmap of service and giving that others will certainly learn from. The author shares his experiences of volunteering with the aim of both entertaining and inspiring others to volunteer as well."--

Download or read book Volunteer Management written by Jaclyn S. Piatak and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-11-11 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volunteers play a critical role in serving communities and delivering public services. Volunteers serve across many areas — in schools, human service organizations, emergency services, and more. By providing services to those in need, volunteers expand the capacity of organizations and can devote extra time to the populations they serve. While research on volunteering has shifted from a focus on recruitment and motivation to management and retention, the focus is largely on universal, one-size-fits-all prescriptions. Volunteer management only recently moved to a contingency perspective focused on organizational needs. However, volunteer management should adapt to meet the needs of organizations and volunteers. Taking a strategic approach, this book provides an overview of volunteer management from planning and recruitment to engagement and evaluation, considering both organizational and volunteer needs and capacity. We develop a strategic volunteer management approach for volunteering to benefit not only the organizations and communities served, but also volunteers and society more broadly. This book advances research on volunteer management by combining the organizational and volunteer perspectives, provides a guide for volunteer administrators and coordinators, and serves well as a text for courses in volunteer management, nonprofit management, and human resource management.

Download or read book Ours to Explore written by Pippa Biddle and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2021-06 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a 2014 essay that went viral, Pippa Biddle revealed the inequities and absurdities baked into voluntourism--the pairing of short-term, unskilled volunteer work with tourism. In the years since, Biddle has devoted herself to understanding the origins, intentions, and outcomes of a multibillion-dollar industry built on the premise of doing good, and she tracks that investigation in Ours to Explore. The flaws of voluntourism have included xenophobia, racism, paternalism, and a "West knows best" mentality. From exploitative orphanages that keep children in squalid conditions to attract donors to undertrained medical volunteers practicing their skills on patients in developing regions and to those looking for an inspiring selfie, Biddle reveals the hidden costs of the voluntourism complex. Along the way, readers meet inspiring activists and passionate community members, as well as thoughtful former voluntourists who still work to make a difference--just differently. Ours to Explore offers a plan for how the service-based travel industry can break the cycle of exploitation and suggests strategies for travelers who want to improve the places they visit for the long haul.

Download or read book The Volunteer written by D. H. Jonathan and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-06-22 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comments from an earlier draft of The "Volunteer", which was formerly posted as a serial on Literotica.com: "I really enjoyed your story and was most impressed in the way that you described Dani's progression through her project. It was refreshing to read about being naked in public without the act being sexual and I suppose typifies the outlook held by naturists. Well done..." - Literotica user tompo296 "I enjoyed reading your story, and appreciated how the ending showed how Dani had been changed by her experience. I liked how you showed the awkwardness and embarrassment of Dani's situation but still provided a mostly safe environment for her to have her experiences. Thank you!" - Jessica Tang Von Harper, author of Candlelight City "This story was not only well written but had something worthwhile to say. It was very interesting to try to understand the subtleties of how Dani felt about nudity." - Literotica user reader_3634 "Read all 17 chapters over the last few days. Couldn't get enough of it." - Literotica reader ikaiser "Words fail me...- I have just read one of the best stories I have ever seen here on Literotica! Please please please continue with Dani's further adventures..." - Literotica reader The_Rat_in_the_Hat Many people dream of being at work or school only to realize that they are either naked or in nothing but their underwear. For university student Danielle Keaton, this dream is about to become her reality. Facing the consequences of a severe lack of judgement, she is forced to make a choice: either give up her scholarships and her plan for graduating from college debt-free, or volunteer to be the test subject in a unique sociological study that will leave her naked and vulnerable to the entire university and eventually the world.

Download or read book Volunteering written by Jean Rawitt and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2020 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "While many young adults want to help their community in some way, many are unsure of where to start. This book empowers teenagers to take action by providing information on how to get started, be successful, and make a difference. First-hand accounts from teenagers provide additional insight from those who have gone through the process themselves"--

Download or read book Building a Successful Volunteer Culture written by Charles Simon and published by SkyLight Paths Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cultivating successful volunteers in the twenty-first century is increasingly more challenging. Budgets are tight, hands are few, and competition for a person's discretionary time is severe. How do you develop and maintain the volunteers who are essential to the vitality of your organization and community? What can you do to avoid volunteer burnout?

Download or read book Making Volunteers written by Nina Eliasoph and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-28 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An inside look at how community service organizations really work Volunteering improves inner character, builds community, cures poverty, and prevents crime. We've all heard this kind of empowerment talk from nonprofit and government-sponsored civic programs. But what do these programs really accomplish? In Making Volunteers, Nina Eliasoph offers an in-depth, humorous, wrenching, and at times uplifting look inside youth and adult civic programs. She reveals an urgent need for policy reforms in order to improve these organizations and shows that while volunteers learn important lessons, they are not always the lessons that empowerment programs aim to teach. With short-term funding and a dizzy mix of mandates from multiple sponsors, community programs develop a complex web of intimacy, governance, and civic life. Eliasoph describes the at-risk youth served by such programs, the college-bound volunteers who hope to feel selfless inspiration and plump up their resumés, and what happens when the two groups are expected to bond instantly through short-term projects. She looks at adult "plug-in" volunteers who, working in after-school programs and limited by time, hope to become like beloved aunties to youth. Eliasoph indicates that adult volunteers can provide grassroots support but they can also undermine the family-like warmth created by paid organizers. Exploring contradictions between the democratic rhetoric of empowerment programs and the bureaucratic hurdles that volunteers learn to navigate, the book demonstrates that empowerment projects work best with less precarious funding, more careful planning, and mandatory training, reflection, and long-term commitments from volunteers. Based on participant research inside civic and community organizations, Making Volunteers illustrates what these programs can and cannot achieve, and how to make them more effective.

Download or read book CrowdRising written by Lorinda R. Rowledge and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-05 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Open innovation enabled through crowdsourcing is one of the hottest topics in management strategy today. Particularly striking – and of vital importance to the world – are the pioneering efforts to apply crowdsourcing technology and open innovation to solve social, environmental, and economic sustainability challenges. CrowdRising sets out these challenges as context and then highlights the experiences of leaders and early adopters, identifies implementation guidelines, critical success factors and lessons learned, and finally projects where the field is going in the future. With a strong focus on the applications of crowdsourcing for innovation, engagement, and market intelligence, the book profiles the initiatives of companies, NGOs, and technology providers using crowdsourcing to develop these solutions to global problems. It addresses the key challenges impacting organizations: 1) identifying more sustainable ways to design, distribute, transport, recycle, and repurpose products; and 2) discovering and implementing the systems needed to transform global economic growth, drive human prosperity, and replenish the planet’s resources.

Download or read book From the Top Down written by Susan J. Ellis and published by Energize Books. This book was released on 2010 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The only book that addresses the senior decision-maker's role in developing a strategy and resources for high-quality volunteer engagement. It explains fundamental subjects that must be considered at the top executive level, including developing a vision for volunteer involvement, creating policies and setting expectations, budgeting and finding funds to support volunteers, hiring the best staff leader, assessing the impact of volunteer contributions, and dealing with legal, risk management, and insurance issues. The new 2010 edition includes information on managing volunteer involvement during an economic downturn, dealing with resistance by middle managers, the evolving vocabulary of volunteerism, new types of volunteering such as online service and voluntourism, the difference between a wage equivalency calculation and the true value of volunteers to an organization, and much more.