Volunteer Programs - Salta, Argentina

Volunteer Programs, Volunteer Work,
in Salta, Argentina, Uruguay and South America

New Items

May 10 Visits to Help Argentina office and Fundacion Conviven

May 3 - Critique of a volunteer program website Voluntario Global

This page is under construction. I am only posting it to give people an idea of what kinds of volunteer programs there are in the world. I am planning to start my own volunteer program, but it won't cost nearly $3,000 for a month! And I won't have anyone sitting in a corporate type office wearing a tie working for me promoting or administering the program as you can see in some of the videos of these other expensive programs. The idea will be to link local English institutes, poor schools, orphanages, and backpackers, and of course EI type skills/education and teen suicide prevention.

I will be working with schools like the one I have been visiting near Salta. I wrote a little about it on Dec 3rd in these files: hugs not drugs, and update on projects in Salta.

Here are some volunteer programs and their costs. These were the top results in Google when searching "Volunteer programs Salta Argentina" as of Dec 3, 2006

This one looks interesting. It looks like if you click on one of their links a sponsor will donate some money to the organzation,

Volunteer Placement
$300 US dollars
This is a flat program contribution, regardless of the length of the program, and includes specialized placement, pre- and post-departure assistance, airport pick-up, arrival orientation,

The "Standard" ISV Program: The “Standard” ISV program is four weeks in length, consisting of a two-week Volunteer Work Project and a two-week Adventure Tour. The cost is $2,790.00 USD, regardless of the country you choose to visit.

The ISV High School Program: The ISV High School program is four weeks in length, consisting of a two-week Volunteer Work Project and a two-week Adventure Tour. The cost is $2,790.00 USD.
*DOMESTIC & INTERNATIONAL Airfares and Air Taxes are not included in the ISV Program Cost.

Thanks for visiting the site. The origins of volunteersouthamerica date from early 2005 when I was looking for grass-roots, zero-cost volunteer work in Argentina.
Finding volunteer work that didn't involve paying a middle-man/third party a large amount of cash was way more difficult than anticipated; The result was many happy hours searching on google, travel forums and obscure spanish-language websites for a suitable volunteer work program.

In the end, for various reasons, I didn't volunteer in 2005; but I had found a handful of interesting volunteer programs and realised that lots of other people were in the same boat as myself - looking for genuine low/zero cost volunteer work in South America. I didn't want my 40+ manhours of research to go to waste so I posted what I'd found on volunteerargentina.net, which in turn, expanded to become volunteersouthamerica.net.

Its a widely held view that you have to pay to volunteer in SA, and its easy to arrive at that conclusion; the internet search engines are dominated by the 'big ticket' volunteer operations, which offer a more packaged, higher cost volunteer experience than I was looking for.
The purpose of this site is to find and list the more obscure & little known low/zero cost volunteer opportunities that exist in SA, hopefully sparing you the hours of research needed to find a such programs. As you may have discovered, with the big players dominating the scene, its not easy finding these websites - so if you know of any I'd really appreciate it if you'd get in touch!

If you represent an organisation that accepts overseas volunteers but doesn't have a website, we can create and host a basic web page for you within volunteersouthamerica.net, where you can publicise your organisation and create a reference point for potential volunteers. See Children_International_Ecuador and Fraternidad_Cristiana_de_Personas_Enfermas as examples of internally hosted pages, this service is provided free of charge and takes about 7 days to set-up.

The volunteer programs on this site fall into 3 generic categories;
First there is the $~300 per month programs that provide full board and accommodation, these are 'flexible' programs that allow you to volunteer for long or short periods, at a time convenient to you. I am confident the programs listed here all do good work, but personally, I would only sign-up to this type of program if I was confident the money was genuinely being used to fund the program.

The second category of program is a day-centre type program, usually involving street-kids. In this type of program volunteers organise their own food & accommodation independently and volunteer during the day. Generally these programs charge little or no fees and are very pleased to see you. Good examples are LIFEargentina and the Cusco based street-kids programs.

The third category of program is the no-fees, longterm commitment operations e.g. voluntariosesperanza or fundacionsantamartha, which ask for 3-12 months of your time but charge no fees and offer free food & board to participants, you've got to love this type of operation and if you are looking to make a real difference and have a life changing volunteer experience, look no further.

In certain cases on the main page, I have given an brief opinion about a volunteer organisation (visible when you hover over the web address for more than 1 second). This opinion is based either on feedback received or just my gut feel about the program. Bear in mind that it is just one persons view; if you happen to believe I have something useful to say, then take notice, you would however be much better off contacting past volunteers from the program(s) you like, to get a clearer picture of what you are letting yourself in for.

If you want to write an article for this site on any volunteer related issue you'd be more than welcome, FYI the site gets hits from lots of countries, but the main ones are (in order) US, United Kingdom, Canada & Australia; presumably from people planning/researching their volunteer work(?).
If you want to write for the site please note that you'll need to use your real name and (optional) include a picture of yourself looking fabulous.

I'd like to thank Elizabeth Sanders and Victoria Ferrero for contributing to the site (see their links on the main page). Elizabeth makes some good points about the maturity of volunteers, which I think would apply to all the programs, not just Bruceperu. Most volunteer organisations have minimal resources and the work is tough and challenging, requiring 100% full-on commitment. If travelling to SA to make a difference isn't the most important thing in your life right now, my advice would be don't volunteer; go backpacking around the continent for 2-3 months and see how you feel after that.

Finally, thanks to (my brother) Phil for his work on building the web-site, we tried to use light-weight images and gimmick-free pages to ensure the site will load quickly on low-speed (that is code for South American) connections. This site is completely non-profit; at times its a pain in the backside to maintain, but if it has spread the word about free volunteering and maybe encouraged one or two people to volunteer who might not otherwise have done so, its been worthwhile.

- Notice how on the main page there is a link asking for donations. And it is flashing. On my websites about my volunteer programs I will not put a link seeking donations on the home page. If I ever ask for donations, it won't be on the first page and it definitely won't be flashing.

- The scrolling banner at the top. It has this statement "Every corner of Buenos Aires has a pulse. A pulse that is worth listening to." To me, this just emotional manipulation, it says nothing about the program. Then there are the typical pictures of kids and communities. Notice how almost everyone is smiling?

- Someone has spent a lot of time on graphics for this site. I wonder whose money paid for it all, but I am guessing it is the volunteers' money.

Again there is the annoying flashing "make a donation" thing. And look at all the colors, which sometimes even make it hard to read. For example, the green on purple words español and ingles.

Donate just a few money: (meanwhile we are waiting the opening of the organization banking account) YOU CAN SAFETLY DONATE BY WESTERN UNION: SENDING THE MONEY TO:
VALERIA GRACIA (PRESIDENT) O ARMIN DIAZ GUZMAN (SECRETARY)

Also, this seems a lttle suspicious, sending money via Western Union to private individuals. I would like to meet these people myself though and see what they are doing, after all who knows, maybe they are good people whose website just isn´t the best.

Google Rank	Website	Cost in US dollars
1	http://www.languagesabroad.volunteeradventures.com/proj_arg_environ.php	2 weeks - $1,340
2	http://www.volunteeradventures.com/volunteer_quests.htm	4 weeks $2,965