Volunteers Against Stereotypes

Volunteering programs are expanding and developed faster. More and more of people travel during their holidays and chose to act heroically. The world of social network exposes challenges and opportunities of volunteering abroad. The campaign #NoSterotypes offers a guide as well as a video to young volunteers and travelers excited to capture every single moment of their holidays or missions on Facebook or Instagram. The campaign was created by the group Raid-Aid, a project by Norwegian Students and Academic's International Assistance Fund (SAIH) how fights against stereotypes in aid and development and Barbie Savior, a parody Instagram account.

For the past years, both groups presented problematic images by Western volunteers. Western volunteers have the tendency of portraying themselves as saviors of the Southern population.

By depicting white Americans and Europeans 'voluntourists', the campaign intent to present how often volunteers presents themselves as 'white saviors'. The white savior is an idea where young Europeans or Americans goes to Africa for humanitarian service during their holidays , and like represent themselves acting.

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According to Norwegian students members from SAIH, the white savior is mainly expressed through social media, where В" voluntourists В", publish several pictures of them surrounded by sick children, in schools and hospitals. In a YouTube video intitled 'How to Get More Likes on Social Media', a young white woman scrolls over her Instagram feed.

In one image, a friend poses with a giraffe with a caption 'Life is an adventure'. In another image, another man shows his muscles while small African children hang off him.

Underneath the photo, it's written 'Real heroes don't wear capes'. Soon, the woman is having her own adventure in an unnamed African country ( 'Real Africa'), posing with sick and impoverished children. She concludes at the end of the video 'Suffering will get you twice likes', avery ironical but true statement, a way of denouncing or acknowledging poverty tourism . Her Instagram likes rises exponentially.

Selfies takers may not realize that their posts or caption can perpetuate stereotypes and rob the subject of dignity or privacy. A white Western person that travels to a far country and that takes videos or images surrounded by many African kids, he/she/they plays a kind of principal character of a story that the image depicts. Very often, the images taken from the individuals ( as the girl in the video) lack of context. These kind of pictures plays a lot with stereotypes. Very often, these images present the populations negatively.

More than one million of people participate to humanitarian work and over 85% of them are white. By including their selves in the pictures, volunteers present their selves as heroes. The children look miserable and helpless while the white volunteers are portrayed as superheroes. The images are all the same , with one or two white faces among many black faces without any context or description. By portraying ironically the young woman in her humanitarian mission, the campaign illustrates acts to avoid. The images give the public the impression that very little need to be done ( offer chocolate for example) to change the life of small Africans. SAIH and Barbie Savior fight naГЇve volunteering (Also called Voluntourism). The pictures taken during the trips are very harmful contributing to poverty porn. By then, they show how only Western people can save the world.

The video is part of a campaign intitled '#NoStereotypes' that discourages volunteers that travel abroad to developing countries to share pictures or videos that could harm locals. The goal is to push people to respect the several cultures, avoid harmful stereotypes and abandon poverty porn . Volunteers are therefore encouraged to question their intentions and motivations, use volunteering as an opportunity to narrate a different story about the population or visited zones , in order to promote locals respects: by taking harmless pictures or not taking aby pictures. Further, in some extent, the combined campaign offers a critics to organizations as Project Abroad that offers volunoutirism. Voluntourism is a part of tourism where members participate in a humanitarian project. As has shown the video, there is no selection or research on the motivations of postulants, neither technical, linguistics or professionals competences.In conclusion, the campaign show volunteers how to not act like white saviors and critics NGO contributing to the poverty porn by hiring people with no competences.