Volunteer Tourism or Global Justice? An Autoethnography Examining My Roles as a Leader and Teacher

ABSTRACT

Volunteer tourism has grown immensely in the last decade, and many participants are white students from predominantly Western universities. This autoethnography examines the cognitive dissonance I felt working as a leader within a US-based non-profit organization operating in Cape Town, South Africa. I systematically explore how my Latine and US cultures exacerbated the conflict between my understanding of cultural humility and fear of perpetuating paternalism. By triangulating qualitative and quantitative data from written personal memos, interviews, and survey responses (n = 108), I identify sources of my dissonance and strategies for achieving consonance by adopting a transformational leadership style. This study highlights the importance of cultural humility within volunteer tourism organizations by employing transformational leadership to encourage self-reflection among its permanent staff and temporary volunteers. The work stands to provide a reflexive guide for leaders of volunteer tourism and outlines how to develop strong relationships between volunteers, staff, and community members.

KEYWORDS:

• Volunteer tourism
• transformational leadership
• cultural humility
• cognitive dissonance
• autoethnography

As a young Latina, mother, and student, I have been told a cyclical story that I must unlock my academic potential to overcome the power structures that oppress me. In 2015, I volunteered with a non-profit organization (NPO) that works with primary-school students in South Africa, providing mentorship and educational interventions on math, literacy, and health topics. To implement these interventions, volunteers (i.e. university students predominantly from the US) come for two to four weeks and work one-on-one with primary-school students (i.e. South African students in grades 3–7). The NPO calls these volunteers “mentors” because their purpose is to mentor the primary-school students by guiding them to achieve their academic and personal goals. As a two-week volunteer to three primary students in 2015, I was enamored by their drive for education because it represented my own. After the two-week experience, I chose to continue working for the organization as a leader in their health development program.

For the next three years, while learning more about how the NPO worked with the community, I developed deep connections with the other leading members of the NPO and the community in Cape Town, which I maintain today. However, as I recognized that not all volunteers and leaders experienced the same immediate connection to the students and the host community, I began to question my purpose and the values of the NPO. As I learned more about cultural humility (Tervalon & Murray-Garcia, 1998) and the critical discourse regarding volunteer tourism (e.g. Butcher, 2017), a dissonance began to grow. Engaging in the process of autoethnography allowed for self-critique and highlighted broader cultural implications (Denzin, 2000; Spry, 2001) pertaining to volunteer tourism. Within this intercultural and educational setting, I use autoethnography to discuss my privilege within the space of the “other” (i.e. volunteers and South African students) (Hughes & Pennington, 2016). While other scholars have explored volunteer tourism from a critical perspective (see Coghlan & Gooch, 2011), few have done so from an autoethnographic perspective, which positions the researcher within the volunteer tourism organization.

To build on the growing theorizing of volunteer tourism as a practice, this autoethnography outlines how I conceptualized my leadership role in the organization and how the reflective process driven by a transformational leadership framework encouraged me to grow into my role. Coghlan and Gooch (2011) argue that volunteer tourism may benefit from action plans and reflective feedback on new roles outlined in the transformative learning framework. As such, the transformational leadership framework and methods that follow provide a potential guide for self-reflection to implement these learning objectives and develop a program that embraces cultural humility as a key component of volunteer tourism. Findings and results highlight that reflection is imperative for establishing strong relationships between NPOs, volunteers, and host communities. To explore and develop this reflective process, I asked the following research question:

RQ: How can I, a US-born Latina, practice transformational leadership in a US-based NPO operating in South Africa to promote cultural humility?

Background

Volunteer tourism as a practice has received both praise and criticism (see Coghlan & Gooch, 2011). Wearing and Neil (2000) suggest the Global South is often used as a tool for Western volunteers to achieve self-actualization and personal growth, yet simultaneously cements barriers of difference, cultural insensitivity, and ignorance between the West and Global South. Although volunteer tourism does not exclusively occur in the Global South, volunteer tourism has become a blanket term that applies to any organization sending participants abroad to have cultural experiences (Palacios, 2010). The following recognizes the nuances of how volunteer tourism may be conceptualized and practiced across organizations.

Volunteer tourists can be described as “individuals who, for various reasons, volunteer in an organized way to undertake holidays that might involve aiding or alleviating the material poverty of some groups in society, the restoration of certain environments or research into aspects of society or environment” (Wearing, 2001, p. 1). Volunteer tourism organizations that focus on an equitable cultural exchange between volunteer tourists and the host community promote equal partnership and sustainability (Krippendorf, 1987). While volunteer tourism scholars argue that addressing unconscious bias among volunteer tourists through self-reflection may promote this equitable exchange (Wearing, 2003), not all organizations have clear action plans for this process (Palacios, 2010) or elicit opportunities for feedback to prompt self-reflection (Leigh, 2006).

The intercultural interactions and development promoted by volunteer tourism are theorized to be a form of ethical tourism which mutually beneficial to members of the host country and the volunteers by giving back to host communities (Krippendorf, 1987). For example, organizations may encourage positive and immersive intercultural experiences to mediate real interactions with locals that simultaneously enhance the self-actualization of the volunteer and the development of the local area (Blackman & Benson, 2010). Wearing (2002) elaborates that organizations and volunteers must focus on understanding and accepting differences for global development practices to be effective. Volunteers who are encouraged to understand cultural differences may reach a stage of adjustment to the host culture, which allows them to fluidly interact between their native and the host culture (McGehee, 2002). Organizations that fit this conceptualization prioritize and facilitate cultural humility and understanding between members of Western and host cultures (Kirillova et al., 2015). Cultural humility is the determination to self-critique how one’s actions, influenced by their culture, affect an organization’s relationship with the community of the host country (Tervalon & Murray-Garcia, 1998).

Conversely, volunteers may choose to venture abroad because of primitive stereotypes of the Global South perpetuated by the media, which foster paternalism over the citizens of the host country rather than appreciation of the culture (Park, 2018). This paternalistic desire to volunteer lacks cultural humility. Wearing and Neil (2000) describe the phenomenon of contemporary cannibalism as the process of consuming a foreign culture as entertainment. For example, in 2017, several volunteers and leaders from my organization attended class hungover or did not attend cultural immersion activities because they seemed to value their role as a tourist more than their role as a volunteer. Although drinking, drug use, and late-night parties are likely normative behaviors among the predominantly college-aged volunteers that participate in these activities (Lough, 2013), this mentality prevented them from being effective mentors to the students. While the volunteers certainly came to South Africa with good intentions, failing to engage with the students or community beyond their entertainment turns the experience into a spectacle rather than an experience of “putting something back” into the local community (Brightsmith et al., 2008; Brown & Lehto, 2005).

Volunteer tourist organizations may unknowingly encourage this behavior if the service element to the host community is not approached with cultural humility (Guttentag, 2009). From a critical perspective, volunteer tourism can be conceptualized as a profit-driven industry reliant on Western volunteers to “help” communities in Global South; however, the ambiguities and negligence of organizations may cause more harm to host communities than good (Blackman & Benson, 2010; Wright, 2013). With this conceptualization, the interactions between the volunteer and the community become one-sided, with the volunteer gaining more opportunity while the communities they serve remain largely unchanged (Blackman & Benson, 2010).

Although these conceptualizations are not mutually exclusive, the contrasts between them certainly inspired the beginning of my reflective process. The shared idea between these conceptualizations is that volunteer tourists are often motivated to partake in humanitarian efforts to develop relationships, experience self-actualization, and build social status (Nadeau & Lord, 2017). I tried to understand how my cultural experiences may leverage these motivations to promote cultural humility and positively impact the South African students. After all, volunteer tourism can have a positive impact on the volunteer and host community when volunteers are guided in assessing their own unconscious bias through a process of self-reflection (Dickey et al., 2020; Wearing, 2003). When I began working for the organization, it had no organized training to develop and maintain the practice of cultural humility among its leaders or volunteers. The lack of training coupled with the behavior of the other organizational leaders and volunteers in 2017 sparked my dissonance—forcing me to vacillate between leaving the organization and trying to change it. During this reflective process, I became determined to develop an organizational culture that cultivated cultural humility. Thus, I chose to conceptualize volunteer tourism as a form of transformative learning (Coghlan & Gooch, 2011), which I could facilitate through transformational leadership.

Transformational leadership

To promote cultural humility within the organization, I aimed to embody my role as a leader guiding both the volunteers and South African students. In addition to guiding the students as a consistent presence between volunteers, I led the volunteers to help them be effective mentors for the students. Within this role, I articulate my positionality as a leader within a volunteer tourism organization and acknowledge how I had to lead as a cultural outsider to many of the volunteers and the students.

As a leader for the volunteers, I trained volunteers to mentor the students in a classroom setting and built their cultural humility by exposing them to community leaders, public health professionals, and South African historians from Cape Town. I actively pursued a transformational leadership style, or “a relationship of mutual stimulation and elevation that converts followers into leaders and may convert leaders into moral agents” (Burns, 1978, p. 4). I aimed to inspire volunteers to think beyond themselves, understand the influences of culture on community health, and recognize that social injustice is not limited to communities of the Global South. I encouraged them to reflect on their experiences in Cape Town to achieve a sense of self-actualization and commit to growing into their new roles as effective mentors.

I also endeavored to practice transformational leadership when working with primary students at the NPO in Cape Town,. I designed a health curriculum that balanced math and science skills with life skills (i.e. nutrition, CPR training, and reproductive health). The curriculum was designed to provide students with the foundational skills required to eventually become health professionals (e.g. doctors, nurses, public health researchers) in South Africa. In the shadow of post-Apartheid South Africa, geographical and social remnants of poverty, racism, and injustice seemed like determinants of my students’ futures. From my experience in academia, I designed a health curriculum that I wish I had as a student. The curriculum exposed students to literature, experiences, and people that would expand their opportunities in hopes that they too would grow into their roles as future health professionals.

Transformational leadership was an appropriate framework to guide my leadership style because it helps to optimize learning in the classroom (Bolkan & Goodboy, 2011) and potentially during volunteer tourism (Coghlan & Gooch, 2011). Students respond positively to three components of transformational leadership: charismatic conversation, individualized consideration, and mutual intellectual stimulation (Bolkan & Goodboy, 2011). Bolkan and Goodboy (2010) conceptualize charismatic conversation as the perceived behaviors of immediacy and engagement from a leader. These behaviors include actions like smiling during conversations or the extent to which leaders make themselves available to others. When leaders aim to personalize an experience, they provide individualized consideration (Waldeck, 2007). Finally, mutual intellectual stimulation refers to the extent to which leaders are perceived to create interactive experiences, challenging learning activities, and opportunities for independence (Bolkan & Goodboy, 2010).

Although I am not leading within the confines of a traditional Western classroom, most of the volunteers are Western college students, and the South African students often referred to me as “teacher”. In the case of volunteer tourism, transformational leadership helps to align subordinates’ self-interest with those of non-profit organizations, elevate their concerns for self-actualization, and provide challenging work (Bass, 1999). This responsive leadership style addressed my dissonance by encouraging volunteers to teach diligently while simultaneously promoting a cross-cultural experience for the volunteers and the South African students.

Dissonance

I can only describe myself as a transformational leader because of my inquiry into my role. My inquiry stemmed from my cognitive dissonance, or the psychological discomfort of my perceived unaligned beliefs and behaviors (Festinger, 1962). In 2017 (my second year as a leader for the NPO), I witnessed a rift between the NPO’s values and the behaviors of other leaders and volunteers. Volunteers and leaders sometimes taught primary students hungover. Some leaders even sold drugs to volunteers. At the time, I interpreted this behavior as placing a priority on partying and consuming the culture for entertainment. When nothing was done by the senior leaders, the NPO and our work seemed to affirm a practice that valued the experience of the volunteers over the students and the host community (Butcher & Smith, 2015; Guttentag, 2009).

Like my own Latine culture, my students’ culture (South African Xhosa) could be described as collectivistic, prioritizing the group over the individual (Hofstede, 2001). In the community, everyone is either Sisi (sister), Bhuti (brother), Mama (mother), or Tata (father). I was comfortable using these greetings and speaking other basic isiXhosa phrases. With my students, I felt at home halfway around the world. However, despite years of gaining an understanding of South African history and my students’ community, I quickly learned that I would never truly understand my students’ culture because of my US cultural ties.

Upon critical self-reflection, I recognize my position as a cultural outsider of both the predominantly white upper-middle-class volunteers of 2017 as well as my South African students. My Latine and US cultural identities required me to partake in a cultural humility process for the volunteer and the students. Only through a deep reflection and an understanding of the mindset of volunteers and leaders could I feel empowered to implement an action plan for cultural humility in 2018, which was lacking in the 2017 programs. Rather than blaming the volunteers or other leaders for my dissonance, I recognized that the 2017 programs were inviting cultural outsiders into my students’ classroom with limited vetting of whether the outsiders would be effective tools for the students’ education. In addition, the organization had no action plan in place to promote cultural humility among the volunteers or its leaders. Therefore, with transformational leadership as a guiding theoretical framework, my autoethnographic approach aims to provide insight into how leaders of US-based NPOs operating in the Global South can systematically reflect on their actions to promote cultural humility to optimize volunteer tourism practice as an equitable exchange (Wearing, 2003).

Method

I found autoethnography to be an appropriate method to delve into my dissonance because it is an accepted method of self-critique that also has the potential to find broader cultural implications (Denzin, 2000; Spry, 2001). The method further provided a unique opportunity to systematically analyze my personal experience within the organization in order to understand the cultural implications of my work (Ellis et al., 2011). Triangulation, or the use of multiple data sources, allowed me to articulate my dissonance with trustworthiness and dependability into in the qualitative data (Hughes & Pennington, 2016) as well as validity and reliability in the quantitative data (Shenton, 2004). Personal memos, interviews, and surveys were used for triangulation, with all methods approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB).

Memos

Personal memo constructed the central narrative of my “self” and revealed the rigorous use of reflexivity and interpretation. Personal memos were appropriate because the practice is ideal to provide rich detail as events occur in the field (Creswell & Poth, 2018). The personal memos were free of memory interpretations and thus allowed for thematic analysis when constructing the findings narratively. The prose outlined by the personal memos aimed to provide the reader an easy format to fully understand the context of my narrative, the process of confronting my dissonance, and the nuanced self-critique of my leadership that influenced the culture of the organization.

Interviews

Three interviews with organizational leaders who worked with the program in 2017 and 2018 were conducted between August and September (shortly after the end of 2018 programs). The participants included the managing director (white-American, 29 years old), the director of academics (white-American, 25 years old), and the regional manager of the NGO (Black-South African, 25 years old). Pseudonyms were used here. All participants were female.

Questions like “How would you describe the 2017 program?” “How is it different from 2018 programs?” and “Has talking about your experience changed how you view your role in the organization?” were asked to substantiate events I perceived as dissonant. In addition, the interviews were used to validate the drastic personal and organizational changes made between 2017 and 2018. The interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim. A focus coding method outlined by Charmaz (2014) was used to code all transcripts. Specifically, initial open codings of interviews and personal memos were conducted to identify unique focus codes that were consolidated into three main themes that represent a narrative arc highlighting my dissonance and the changes made to the leadership team to promote cultural humility.

Surveys

Volunteers participating in 2017 (n = 55) and 2018 (n = 53) completed post-experience surveys designed to assess their responses to program leadership. Demographics revealed that all participants were from U.S.-based universities. In addition, a plurality self-categorized as female (79.6%) and white/Caucasian (42.6%).

For transformational leadership, three separate subscales were measured (Andersen, 1979; Bolkan & Goodboy, 2010; Waldeck, 2007): charismatic conversation (e.g. “During dialogues I was vocally expressive”), mutual intellectual stimulation (e.g. “I presented relative material in a novel way”), and individualized consideration (e.g. “My personal interests were considered”). and All items were measured on 5-point Likert scales. The analysis and triangulation process of the data resulted in a cohesive narrative comparing my experiences in 2017 and 2018, which allowed me to disentangle the sources of my cognitive dissonance. From this narrative emerged effective transformational practices that brought about a sense of consonance by promoting cultural humility.

Findings & results

A lack of leadership

In 2017, the program was teeming with program leaders. Fifteen people were all trying to direct the culture of the volunteer and student experience. The leaders, despite returning for a second or third year, arrived in Cape Town with a limited understanding of South African culture and, like me, lacked any true understanding of cultural humility. When working with students, some leaders strictly focused on the curriculum, others created chaos by only emphasizing playing, and a handful chose not to show up at all. The latter two groups of leaders participated in the previously mentioned misconduct (e.g. teaching hungover), which created a disconnect among leadership and disorder in the classroom. Although only a few leaders consistently missed teaching days with the students from being hungover or choosing to explore new romantic relationships, their behaviors rippled across each group of volunteers for the entirety of the program. Every week, leadership meetings were filled with disagreement and passive-aggressive criticisms, which resulted in little to no progress on how to steer the intercultural experience of the volunteers and the students. As a team, we were in a type of purgatory that facilitated the same behaviors that ultimately left the volunteers disengaged from the “putting back” parts of the experience.

Several leaders continued to encourage late-night binge drinking or drug use with volunteers in a way that made me feel like I was part of a fraternity rather than an organization. Indeed, a group of volunteers were kicked out of their accommodations because of a party that damaged both property and their reputation between the organization and the community. The more senior leaders had to conduct several meetings with community leaders to allow future volunteers to stay there. Despite recognizing the behavior as inappropriate, any discussion only resulted in more covert tactics to binge drink, resulting in poor delivery of the curriculum from absent volunteers. The conflicting leadership styles exacerbated the cultural disconnect of volunteers and magnified the need for change. As Juliet, the director of academics, explained, “[2017] made me more aware of the holes that have always bothered me about [the organization] and how some of it has never changed”. Among the remaining 2018 leadership, we agreed that the lack of leadership resulted in a focus on maximizing how much fun the volunteers had—commodifying the experience as a vacation rather than upholding the mission of the organization.

Practicing transformational leadership

With a small leadership group that shrunk to only four from 15 in 2018, I practiced transformational leadership by encouraging the volunteers to self-evaluate throughout their experiences in order to improve how they interacted with and taught the students. Despite sharing many cultural aspects with the volunteers by being born and raised in the US, I often felt like an outsider to their white, upper-middle-class culture. I was confused when they would ask to skip teaching to go on a safari or be insistent on videotaping and photographing everything. Rather than judge the behaviors and beliefs I found inappropriate, paternalistic, or privileged, I was committed to meeting the volunteers where they were based on their understanding of cultural humility. As such, I promoted mutual intellectual stimulation by presenting relative material in a novel way and allowing them to openly reflect on and discuss it. I also gave individualized consideration to volunteers by having several one-on-one discussions with them. The other leaders also aimed to implement characteristics of a transformational leader. Themba admitted, “Some [volunteers] didn’t know how to treat the children, but they made a decision not to vacation. They chose to come and teach. I don’t care how silly, stubborn, or even racist they are. I made them learn how to treat the students”.

While some volunteers may have arrived with the expectation that this trip would simply be a nice way to fill a line on their resumé, we all tried to lead by example and had difficult conversations with the volunteers about race, injustice, and cultural humility. We ate with volunteers during communal meals, sat with them when they taught, and spoke critically but constructively during lesson planning to comprehend the volunteers’ behavior. As such, we provided an opportunity for them to reflect on their potential bias and receive constructive feedback to grow into their roles as “mentors”. Juliet enthusiastically claimed, “I think we did a great job making ourselves available and explaining policies, questions, and procedures. To make the volunteer experience seamless and efficient”. Level up became our mantra for 2018 to signify how each remaining leader felt as though we were upgrading the volunteer experience by emphasizing transformational leadership. Some of the results in this shift are highlighted in Table 1.

Table 1. T-tests comparing changes in the volunteers’ perceived leadership from 2017 to 2018.

	2017 (n = 55)		2018 (n = 53)
Variable	Mean	SD	Mean	SD	t	df	p
Charismatic Conversation	4.31	0.48	4.57	0.44	−2.87	106	p < .01
Mutual Intellectual Stimulation	3.86	0.55	4.16	0.53	−2.88	106	p < .01
Individualized Experience	4.25	0.60	4.67	0.40	−4.29	106	p < .01

Indeed, surveys with 108 former volunteers from 2017 (n = 55) and 2018 (n = 53) showed significant increases in charismatic conversation, mutual intellectual stimulation, and individualized consideration. These quantitative results helped me realize the power I had to create a positive culture in 2017. I confidently claim the lack of leadership in 2017 was not solely the fault of irresponsible leaders or the volunteers, but partially due to my ineffective leadership style which I remedied in 2018.

Embracing cultural humility

I thought I was exempt from contemporary cannibalism and the other critiques of volunteer tourism because I did not participate in binge drinking, drug use, or parties. However, I failed to recognize the more subtle cultural aspects of the organization that impact the students. My Latine culture did not provide an inherent grasp of cultural humility. For example, when I was pregnant, one of my students asked me if my baby would be white. I laughed hard. To me, being raised in a country where no one would mistake me for white; where a high school teacher called me her cleaning lady for four years; and where I am questioned about my citizenship even after explaining I am Puerto Rican, I never thought my students would see me as white. I love teaching and I thought my brown skin and experience with overcoming the odds would allow me to connect on a deeper level with my students. Unfortunately, my Latine culture blinded me to my American culture and privilege.

I unknowingly exercised that privilege every time I chose not to be a stronger leader. I was given the opportunity to opt out of the unjust behavior because it did not affect me directly. My individualistic cultural value reassured me that as long as I did my job, that would be enough. I assumed that encouraging the other leaders and volunteers to act with more cultural humility was not my responsibility. As a result of my assumptions, the burden fell on the students because they lost days of learning or felt that they had no mentor committed to them. With this realization, I feared that my presence was contributing to oppression, which made me almost quit working for the organization altogether. But I recognized that simply walking away from the organization would be another act of privilege. Instead, I chose to utilize my privilege to develop a new culture that emphasized social justice for the students rather than indulgence for the leaders and volunteers.

Notably, a major change after the 2017 programs was that only four leaders were allowed to return to their positions in 2018 (Debra, Juliet, Themba, and myself). While this consolidation of leadership created more work for us, we were able to make fast, positive changes as a smaller, more focused team. Both I and the organization grew from the internal struggles of 2017. Debra, our managing director, asserted, “[We had to do] the critical work of collectively defining who we are and who we want to be, what we want to achieve … we’ve grown from it”. Themba, the regional manager, clarified why we were the few leaders that stayed: “We value our kids, we value our work, but we recognize we can do better”. The remaining leaders were committed to the reflexive process required to practice cultural humility.

As such, we devised an action plan to promote cultural humility. We made the primary students rather than the volunteers the focus of the organization by framing all the experiences as an effort to enhance the students’ education and connect with their community. Our upgraded curriculum included a computer lab and more field trips with the volunteers. These additions gave the students the ability to further enhance their academic knowledge and exposed them to enriching experiences like a campus tour of Cape Town University and hands-on experiments at the Cape Town children's science museum. I further challenged the volunteers by highlighting that this experience was not a vacation but hard work, and we were working together to complete it. As Debra described, “[2018] was driven by community and a common goal of facilitating brave and empowering spaces for volunteers, students, and leaders alike”. Ultimately, we worked as a team, both leaders and volunteers, to pursue a common vision of empowerment.

The reflexive process answered the research question by providing a deeper understanding of my role as a leader in the organization. I could no longer assume my connection to the community was deeper because I came from a culture with similar values. Only by critically reflecting on my perceptions and actions could I take proactive steps to improve the culture of the organization. While this reflective narrative presents personal and emotional recall, the implications of reflecting on my dissonance may provide a guide for other Western NPOs operating in the Global South. The transparency presented in the findings is meant to encourage others to practice such self-reflection, as it may serve as a means to elicit feedback about our roles in volunteer tourism and organize action plans to effectively “put something back”.

Discussion

This study triangulated personal memos, interviews, and surveys to inform a transformation of the volunteer tourism program from one that focused on the experience of the volunteer into one that prioritized the education of the students by promoting cultural humility. The autoethnographic perspective highlights differences in the organization between 2017 and 2018 that allowed me to reflect on my dissonance. In doing so, this study provides a means to better understand the impact of practicing cultural humility within volunteer tourism organizations. As such, contributions of the study include a theoretical understanding of being a transformational leader and promoting cultural humility in US-based NPOs operating in the Global South.

Transformational leadership

As a way of addressing the organization’s culture in 2017, active transformational leadership used in 2018 allowed me to connect with the volunteers and reconnect with my work in a way that amplified positive outcomes. I felt more connected to the volunteers because I invested in their journeys as members of the organization rather than focusing on the enjoyment of their experience. Debra, Juliet, and Themba revealed that the interview process unintentionally allowed them to think critically about their actions as leaders. They confessed that they would not have asked themselves these questions unprovoked. Since completing this project, leaders of the organization have devoted more time to reflexive and critical discussions that rely on these questions. Engaging in this autoethnographic process allowed me to deeply reflect on my leadership role in the organization (Herrmann, 2017) and it encouraged my colleagues to also reflect. Considering that trying new roles and receiving feedback may be lacking from volunteer tourism practices (Palacios, 2010), the reflective practices of cultural humility may provide opportunities to elicit that feedback from the self, volunteers, and host community leaders.

Similarly, transformational leadership is ideal for NPOs because it allows leaders to encourage subordinates to achieve self-actualization in the absence of paid incentives (Bass, 1999). Volunteer tourism organizations that emphasize transformative learning and training prior to travel have been observed to enhance the value of the experience for volunteers, even if they volunteer for a short period (Hammersly, 2014). As such, the reflexive process for the volunteers now begins long before they arrive in-country. Video calls with volunteers are designed to get them thinking about the historical and cultural contexts of working with the community and the primary students. This pre-travel training also allows the volunteers to practice their new roles as mentors before they arrive in the host community. While several authors have argued the importance building knowledge prior to travel (Mensah et al., 2021; Raymond & Hall, 2008 ), few studies have highlighted the success of the practice (see Hammersly, 2014). Ultimately, other organizations may benefit from reframing the volunteer experience with tools of transformational leadership to equip volunteers to use cultural humility goals to integrate into the community rather than reject a culture. While volunteers may perceive the experience as a simple two-week leisure activity, leaders of these organizations can be responsible for vetting and training the volunteers to empower them to achieve self-actualization through cultural humility.

Cultural humility

The improved curriculum and additional field trips enhanced the learning experience for the students. We aimed to achieve an equitable education experience by providing access to more academic opportunities than would be provided to even the international private school in the area (Duncan-Andrade, 2007). Similar to reframing the experience for the volunteers, we also reframed volunteers for the organization. They were no longer customers that purchased an abroad leisure excursion; instead, they were a learning resource for the primary student. By increasing the volunteers’ cultural humility skills, we created a better resource for the students. We hoped to not just “put something back,” but to give something that promoted equity. By listening more to the principal, guardians, community members, and students we developed a an environment that emphasized co-learning between the primary students and volunteers. This action plan allowed the students to define their education and pursue their goals without worrying about the lack of resources. This has fostered lasting relationships in which volunteers continue to invest in the students’ education today. Several of our South African students have graduated high school and have been accepted to universities. The action plan for the students arose from practicing cultural humility, and other global NPOs may benefit from listening to all community members when constructing any learning experience in which foreigners and locals interact. An exchange of ideas is argued to be critical for cultural adaption (Wearing & Grabowski, 2011) as well as beneficial for host communities who meaningfully interact with NPOs and volunteers (see Mensah et al., 2021).

Privilege

This study highlighted the importance of recognizing Western privilege regarding my cultural minority status. I will always be barred from truly achieving a cultural competency of my students’ community (Minkler, 2012). Therefore, training and empowering organization leaders from the community, like Themba, to mentor primary learners will minimize the reliance on Western volunteers and leadership. Simply put, volunteer tourism organizations that aim to practice cultural humility should strive to become obsolete in the communities they serve by empowering the community to implement community development projects independently. In other words, we must strive to listen to the needs vocalized by the community and allow them to participate in the community engagement projects as they see fit. This conceptual shift in practicing volunteer tourism emphasizes working with the community, rather than acting as a paternalistic entity that holds all the decision-making power.

Limitations

This study is not without limitations. Despite the triangulation of data, the interpretations come from my experience working with a relatively small organization that operates only a few months out of the year in the host community. Future research should examine leadership in more diverse volunteer sending organizations to provide a template for larger organizations. In addition, future research should look at transformational leadership with a longitudinal study that can track differences within and between volunteers cohorts. The volunteers from 2017 took the survey more than a year after completing the initial volunteer experience, while those in the 2018 program took the survey only a few months after the conclusion of the program. Pre- and post-volunteer experience surveys may provide more opportunities for leaders to gain feedback on their roles and refine action plans to promote cultural humility. Still, the autoethnographic process provides a guide that the organizational leaders of the NPO continue to use today.

Conclusion

I began this autoethnographic process because I felt dissonance that my organization left our students vulnerable to the unpredictability of incompetent volunteers and laissez-faire leaders. Through this process, I found harmony between my understanding of cultural humility and my actions as a leader from the US working in the Global South. By focusing on making the volunteers better mentors for the students, I more effectively performed my role as a Latina-American transformational leader. This study suggests that reflection and action must be incorporated into each level of participation within a volunteer tourism organization operating in the Global South. Cultural humility may be a critical component to assure socially just and equitable interactions between organizations and host communities. Therefore, this autoethnography serves as a personal reflection process that will continue to be used in my work and hopefully inform the work of others as well.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).