I'd Love to Save the World, But I'm Broke.

Julia Alvarez Garcia

10 hours ago

6 min read

I’m unemployed. And somewhere between my morning, my afternoon and my late-night spiral of confusing thoughts about what to do with my life, I have decided to go back to studying and redirect my career towards international cooperation.

I have a few months to kill before I start and, given the amount of free time on my hands, I thought I could do something with it. Something meaningful. Something that wasn’t simply waiting for October to arrive while once again reconsidering my life choices from the sofa.

I decided to volunteer. Naively, I thought finding a volunteering opportunity that lasted a few weeks would be easy. After all, we live in a world where humanitarian aid seems urgently needed wherever you look.

Instead, my daily routine soon turned into a loop of correspondence: email after email, obsessive searches, identical forms and interview calls. Nothing seemed to be enough. The deeper I got into the world of volunteering, the more the requirements seemed to grow before I could even be considered, let alone put on a waiting list.

The requirements were beginning to sound less like volunteering and more like a job application: minimum commitments of between six months and a year, full-time availability with no possibility of combining it with remote work, and a mystical minimum of five years’ previous experience. On top of that came the contemporary extra of “participation fees” for international programmes, which could easily run into thousands of euros.

And yes, there are good reasons for organisations to ask for long-term commitments. Someone arriving for two weeks, for example, may need training, supervision and time to understand the community they will be working with. The problem is not that organisations ask for commitment; the problem is what that commitment quietly means for those who cannot give their time or money to a good cause in this way.

Because six months away does not simply mean six months of volunteering; it means six months without a salary, six months without paying into the system and six months when you can afford not to have an income.

That is where another form of inequality, one we talk about less, begins: having control over our own time. We all have the same 24 hours in a day, but having time and being able to decide what to do with it are two very different things. Not everyone can leave a job, put a career on hold or go months without an income to dedicate that time to a cause, however important it may be.

Six free months mean very little if you need to spend them securing the same resources you are being asked to give up to volunteer: time and money.

So who can say, “I’m leaving for a few months,” without something falling apart in their absence?

Only those whose survival does not depend entirely on turning their time into a salary every month. Those with savings, assets, family support or simply a financial safety net that can carry them through their leave. People who can decide to go without their income for a while without an immediate threat to their stability.

In other words, the people most able to participate in certain forms of “doing good” are often precisely those who already have the greatest financial freedom. Of course, that does not make their desire to help any less genuine, but it does force us to ask why we have built certain forms of volunteering around those very privileges.

When did volunteering become something you needed to be able to afford?

Social media is perhaps the clearest example of how this idea has quietly settled in without us even noticing. During my search, cookies did their job, and my algorithm began filling up with what looked less like volunteering opportunities and more like tourist experiences dressed up as solidarity: “You can transform reality”, “Be part of the change”, “Together, we can change the lives of thousands of children”.

Voluntourism had made its way onto my screen.

And with it came a cocktail that was increasingly difficult to separate: solidarity, experience, purpose, personal growth, another line on the CV and, why not, the satisfaction of feeling like a good person. All bundled together. An experience you can buy, live and then tell people about.

Because doing good is not only something we do; it also says something about who we are.

Being caring and empathetic, getting involved in humanitarian causes, crossing borders to “make a difference”: these are things to which we have attached enormous moral value. We like to think of ourselves as conscious, committed people, willing to do something for others. Ultimately, we like to see ourselves, and to be seen, as good people.

Look at almost any organisation or NGO offering international volunteering programmes, and the image tends to look familiar: the volunteer smiling, visibly happy and fulfilled, next to the person they are helping, who appears deeply grateful for their presence. The image not only shows us what the volunteer is doing, but it also suggests what kind of person they are.

Getting involved in a cause, helping others and showing solidarity are socially rewarded actions and, as a result, acquire value. A value that is not only moral or social, but also economic. Hence, volunteering experiences are now sold for thousands of euros and, once again, doing good can become a privilege.

Voluntourism simply had to learn how to package that value and sell it back to us. And how did it do that? Entering one of the thousands of international volunteering websites is almost a multisensory experience. Everything seems to revolve around the volunteer. “Solidarity” projects come accompanied by paradise beaches, exotic animals and the main tourist attractions of countries that, at the same time, are presented to us as places in need of our help.

Honestly, browsing some of these websites can feel more like entering an online shop than looking for somewhere you might actually be useful. First, you choose where you want to go, and then, if you feel like it, you can worry about the social project.

The curious thing is that these experiences tend to look remarkably similar from one country to another, despite supposedly being designed to help communities with little or nothing in common and completely different needs. The flag next to the price may change, but the experience on offer is suspiciously similar.

When the needs are different, yet the experience remains unchanged, it becomes quite clear who it has been designed with in mind: the volunteer, not the community.

Because with that package, we’re not just buying the opportunity to help. We’re also buying a personal experience, that is, the feeling that we’ve done something useful, that we’ve used our privilege for a good cause, or even that we’ve played our small part in tackling an inequality where we know we start from a position of advantage.

And that has value too.

Because for a long time now, we have not consumed things solely for what they give us, but also for what they say about us. The places we travel to, the clothes we wear, the food we eat or the causes we choose to support have all become small pieces of the story we construct about who we are.

Volunteering can become an especially visible way of proving it.

It is no longer simply “I volunteered”, but “I am someone who volunteers”. The experience stops being just something you did for a few weeks or months and starts becoming part of the story you tell about who you are.

And the cherry on top has been social media, where we can also make sure everyone else approves of this socially valued version of ourselves: someone caring, committed and, ultimately, a good person.

In the photo, of course, you cannot see the thousands of euros it cost to get there or the actual impact our presence had on those communities.

Perhaps that is where the contradiction lies: we have managed to turn one of the most selfless ways of relating to others into an experience that, to begin with, requires you to have the resources to access it.

And if solidarity has become something you need to be able to afford, who gets to be a “good person”?

Because perhaps generosity does not depend solely on what we are willing to give, but also on what we can afford to lose.