You may not fancy yourself as a budding Mother Teresa or Princess Di – but chances are
that if you’re reading this chapter, you’ve been overseas, have seen a need and want to do
something substantial to alleviate it. Perhaps you identified this need as an international
volunteer; maybe it presented itself to you while you were travelling, or perhaps you’ve
spent years doing business in a region and feel that it’s time to give something back.
Whatever your motivations are, starting up your own aid organisation can be fulfilling and
exciting. It can also be hard work and a lifelong commitment.
What you aim to do could take many forms. The organisation you set up might turn
out to be a volunteer-sending agency, a fundraising charity, or it might simply involve
you raising money at home and returning to a particular place to make tangible improve-
ments. While these all sound like noble aims, it is important to remember that even the
most well-intentioned efforts can create more problems than they solve by inappropriately
injecting funds, volunteers or projects into an area on the basis of a presumed ‘need’. To
avoid such a negative outcome, it’s crucial that your project is based on local participation
and that it aims for sustainability. You need to be sure that the local community is funda-
mentally supportive of what you’re proposing and that you’re in it for the long haul. With
these things in mind, the rest of this chapter will give some starting points from which to
embark upon the adventure of a lifetime.

10: Start Your Own

Charitable Project

Volunteers can assist with monitoring frog populations in the Peruvian Amazon Photo: http://www.biosphere-expeditions.org