establish a peace house to help revitalize the area and to conduct advocacy on the illegality of the Wall. Building a peace house in a dead area requires a source of inspiration, and the book was written to provide such inspiration (as a complement to that which springs from activities that are undertaken at the house). So the question here is: how can we create hope in a desperate situation? More specifically, how can volunteer tourism contribute to the principles of hope (normative and existential issues) in a desperate situation through creating concrete improvements in areas such as education, healthcare, training and youth empowerment?
notion of traditional volunteering is supported by Cnaan et al. (1996) who outline four key dimensions: free choice, remuneration, structure and intended beneficiaries. With respect to tourism, Graham and Foley (1998) discuss volunteers working in museums in Glasgow and similar work has been done by Orr (2006). It is noted that the opportunities available for volunteering in the tourism domain usually include the notion of ‘payment’ (Wearing, 2003a;
Benson, 2005; Tourism Research and Marketing (TRAM), 2008). The extent to which this influences the concept of ‘volunteering’ from both the demand and supply side has yet to be examined.
The growth in VT has produced a range of resources and publications from guides to companies offering volunteer projects to websites offering information, support services and projects. More recently academic activity has grown with the emergence of academic books, journal articles and the recently launched (2007) Journal of International Volunteer Tourism and Social Development.
VT has also been examined as a form of alternative tourism or ecotourism, emphasizing the sustainable, responsible and educational undertones of the activity (Wearing, 2001). Whelan (1991), for instance, suggested that
‘ecotourists represent a potential army of recruits with free time and money to spend on sustainable development efforts’. Furthermore, VT experience has been viewed as a contextual platform for intertwining interactions among the ecotourism element, the volunteer element, and the serious leisure element (Stebbins, 1982, 1992; Wearing, 2001). Stebbins defines volunteering as
‘un-coerced help offered either formally or informally with no or, at most, token pay done for the benefit of both the people and the volunteer’. Other definitions of volunteering have also included recognition that volunteers provide assistance, or unpaid service, usually for the benefit of the community (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 1986). Others emphasize the characteristics of the activity as freely chosen, without financial gain and generally aimed at helping others (Van Til, 1979; Stebbins, 1982, 1992). The activities during a volunteer holiday vary widely and take place in different locations. They can be roughly divided into the following categories: economic development (work related to construction, agricultural assistance, collecting funds, project administration, technical assistance); social development (work related to anti drugs programmes, medical services, orphanages, working with street children, education, youth aids information programmes); and scientific research (work related to wildlife, water quality, archaeology, conservation and natural areas) (Van Rheenen, 2004). There is almost always the opportunity for volunteers to interact with the local community and to take part in local activities. Leisure activities such as trekking, hiking, mountain-biking or scuba diving are sometimes offered for travellers who want to have some fun and excitement along with their volunteer work. Lyons and Wearing (2008, pp. 86–87) made a distinction between volunteer tourists based on their activities, identifying two distinct types of volunteer tourists: community volunteers and wildlife volunteers.
The community volunteers can be defined as those who ‘ volunteer in an organized way to undertake holidays that might involve aiding or alleviating the material poverty of some groups in society (…) or research into aspects of
society’. Wildlife volunteers are those who ‘volunteer in an organized way to undertake holidays that might involve the restoration of certain environments or research into aspects of environment’.
Travelling overseas as a volunteer appears to have begun around 1915 (Gillette, 1968; Clark, 1978; Beigbeder, 1991; Darby, 1994). Most of the literature in this field has focused on profiling the volunteering tourist (Brown and Morrison, 2003; Wearing, 2003b) with increasing interest in understanding vacation volunteers’ motives and the benefits derived. Exploratory research suggests that their motivations appear to be similar to those of long-term volunteers, but the relative value of various factors can differ, with self- actualization being very important for short-term volunteers (Gazley, 2001).
Brown and Morrison (2003) suggest that a volunteer vacation helps heal
‘corporate burnout’ by providing the individual with a sense of accomplishment outside the workplace.
Several research studies have been conducted on the motivations of volunteer tourists to illustrate that there are specific reasons for participation in volunteer holidays (Wearing, 2001; Brown and Morrison, cited in Brown and Letho, 2005; McIntosh and Zahra, 2007; Lyons and Wearing, 2008). There are concerns that growth in VT brings ethical and moral dilemmas. There is growing evidence that volunteers are concerned over what their payment contributes to. Does it aid host community development? The role of fundraising by organizations and the extent to which this is ethically sound are part of a growing rhetoric among volunteers.
In terms of the volunteering process, the ‘American model’, suggested by Leopold (2000, cited in Brown, 2005) begins with what is needed and recruits volunteers to do the work. In Europe, there is a tradition whereby everything starts with the members who decide what to do. In spite of this, volunteering is viewed as contributing to the wellbeing of volunteers (Stebbins, 1982; Cnaan et al., 1996; Thoits and Hewitt, 2001). Volunteering gives participants a sense of purpose, provokes serious contemplation, encourages concern for others, provides the opportunity to further an interest and generates a sense of deep personal fulfilment (Stebbins and Graham, 2004). Stebbins (1992) proposes that volunteering provides durable benefits for the volunteer such as self- actualization, self-enrichment, recreation or renewal of self, feelings of accomplishment, enhancement of self-image, self-expression, social interaction and belongingness.
Broad (2003) suggested that volunteers were more open to positive attitude changes when exposed to a different culture, which may explain why volunteers regularly reported becoming more broad-minded, content, and relaxed, and less selfish and psychocentric as outcomes of volunteering, along with a changed way of looking at the world.
There continues to be much research in regard to serious leisure volunteers and their motivation to volunteer as well as the fulfilment they derive from their diverse pursuits. Stebbins (1982, 1992; Stebbins and Graham, 2004) has conducted some pioneering work in conceptualizing VT in the context of leisure. Stebbins believes that motivations vary greatly with different demographic categories of people taking up volunteering but the twin motives
of altruism and self-interest are common to all categories. In his reflection of
‘serious leisure’, Stebbins points out that it is an important part of people’s lives in relation to personal fulfilment, identity enhancement and self-expression (1982).
To conclude this section, where does VT start and where does it end?
There is a very thin line between mainstream tourism and international VT and sometimes it is hard to tell the difference from other forms of alternative tourism. Is a backpacker who volunteers for a week during his or her trip of 1 year a volunteer tourist? For one it is; for another it isn’t. For example, ‘A 40-year-old San Francisco resident took a four-week jaunt to Africa. On his trip, he visited four countries and took two high-priced safaris. He also spent two days at three orphanages, where he played with children and dropped off suitcases full of clothes. It just didn’t seem right, he said, to go to Africa and not do any volunteer work’ (Yoshino, 2007, p. 1). This man probably considers himself a volunteer tourist, but is he really? It is not up to us to determine if someone is a volunteer tourist or not but this illustrates the difficulty of definition.
VT is between alternative tourism and international volunteering, and shows considerable overlap with both.
However, one thing remains obvious in this discussion. Volunteer and alternative tourism both take place in a context imbued with normative and existential perspectives. Therefore, it becomes important to elaborate on the relations between VT and normative and existential issues in the Palestinian tourism context.