Weaving a Dense Web: A (Decolonial) Study into the Contributions of Host Organizations of Development Volunteers in Jalisco,Mexico

Abstract

Despite increasing interest in the role played by global South receiving organizations of development volunteers, their agency and efforts are rarely investigated in detail. Our qualitative study explores the involvement of receiving partners in international volunteering spaces, using the German Weltwärts programme in Mexico as an example. By applying decolonial theory, and politics and ethics of care lens to our data, we explore how these organizations are ‘weaving’ a dense assistance and safety web around the volunteers. Such assistance is usually not monetized and mainly invisible in the discussion of volunteering for development. Our findings challenge the development discourse and the positionality of northern volunteers within the development architecture.

I. Introduction

Scholarship on volunteering for development (V4D) has traditionally focused on the volunteers’ motivations, experiences, and learnings (Haas, 2020). Recently, the interest in the perspectives of receiving organizations (also called partner and host organizations) has been gaining ground (e.g., Repenning, 2016; Schech et al., 2015; Tiessen, 2018). However, despite the interest in the role played by these stakeholders, such studies frequently keep portraying volunteers as protagonists. The hosts’ efforts are rarely investigated in detail, although a few exploratory studies have addressed this research gap (e.g., Fee, 2021). Several recent inquiries take an important step towards the recognition of the hosts’ role, as they concentrate on the relationship between hosts and volunteers (Everingham & Motta, 2022; Tiessen et al., 2018; Vorstermans & MacDonald, 2022). However, most such studies still miss the opportunity to explore the hosts’ agency more thoroughly, as they focus on receiving partners’ motivations, experiences, and impressions rather than their actions, practices, and efforts.

Receiving organizations appreciate the volunteers’ efforts and their stimulating insights into the organizations’ routines and structures; they also value the ‘intercultural’ challenges of their presence and recognize the international volunteers’ importance for the organizations’ prestige. Nevertheless, they do not always consider development volunteers’ contributions as essential, while significant efforts are made by organizations’ personnel, mentors, and hosting families to create a satisfying volunteering experience (e.g., Fuchs, 2020).

Our study contributes to the understanding of the involvement of receiving partners in international volunteering spaces. We conducted 19 qualitative interviews from April to July 2021 with local stakeholders of the German Weltwärts programme (partner and host organizations, guest families, coordinators, mentors, clients, and target groups) in the state of Jalisco, Mexico. Specifically, we conducted 17 one-to-one and two focus group interviews using a semi-structured guide. ¹ We repeatedly examined and coded the transcripts in search of recurrent and overarching themes associated with hosts’ volunteer-related activities. The final thematic map of our findings (Strauss & Corbin, 1990) includes three main themes: (a) preparing the ground for the volunteers’ activities; (b) ensuring the volunteers’ well-being during the stay; and (c) turning volunteering into a learning experience. We analysed our data using the decolonial critical theory (e.g., Mignolo, 2007; Quijano, 1999) and the perspective of politics and ethics of care (e.g., Betthyány, 2020; Borgeaud-Garciandía, 2018). They offer frameworks for examining the complexities of the hosts’ efforts, which tend to be rendered invisible and are rarely interpreted as ‘work’.

Our study shows that receiving organizations’ contributions, far from being sporadic or spontaneous, are part of organizational dynamics and are supported by the professional experience of those involved. Receiving organizations are happy about the complementary contributions of volunteers, but they must invest diverse resources to integrate the volunteers on different levels of their professional and private life. From a decolonial perspective, these investments and efforts challenge the development aid discourse and the positionality of northern volunteers within the development architecture.

Our article is structured in six sections. After problematizing the role of receiving organizations in volunteering for development (V4D) programmes in Section I and introducing the Weltwärts programme in Section II, we outline our theoretical lenses in Section III. This is followed by the presentation of our findings in Section IV and the discussion in Section V. Section VI contains our conclusion.

II. Volunteering for Development and the Role of Receiving Organizations

International volunteering within the development framework ranges from short-term assignments lasting only a few weeks to 2-year assignments. Next to skilled volunteering, some programmes target young people without specific skills highlighting the exchange and the learning character of volunteering (Lough & Tiessen, 2018, p. 104). Independently of the volunteers’ trajectory, activity, and framework, we refer to such activities as V4D, as almost all North–South programmes explicitly or implicitly refer to development as a discourse, concept, and practice (Crewe & Axelby, 2013, p. 12).

V4D programmes are traditionally organized by NGOs from the global North together with their partner organizations in the global South, often supported by public funding (Georgeou, 2012). The V4D sector has undergone several transformations recently, for instance by designing more flexible and hybrid forms of volunteering that bring local, regional, and international volunteers together (Haas & Moinina, 2021).

In this article, we focus on traditional North–South programmes, which are still the dominant model and come with particular post- or neo-colonial problems that are at the centre of our inquiry. For this purpose, we define North–South V4D as an ‘organized and pre-defined period of engagement and contribution to “development,” organized by public and/or non-profit organizations, by volunteers from the global North who work in the global South and who receive little or no monetary compensation’.

V4D programmes have been increasingly scrutinized critically by scholars from different disciplines. Several studies pointed out the disturbing representations transmitted by V4D programmes, which tend to reproduce a profound distinction between the so-called developed and developing worlds (e.g., Haas & Repenning, 2018; Simpson, 2004; Kontzi, 2015). ‘Contemporary representations of volunteering abroad can reinforce colonial imagery, whereby the more dramatic and different aspects of non-European societies are aestheticized, while their historical and local contexts are largely ignored’ (Tiessen et al., 2018, p. 10). However, while aware of the political importance of representation, we argue that it is just as important to examine how these cultural images translate into institutional practices and structures.

One such translation on a political and structural level is the systematic exclusion of southern stakeholders from (most) decision- making processes and formalized steering structures (Haas, 2020, p. 60). For instance, the funding ministry, the German sending NGOs, and returned volunteers are directly and formally represented in a joint steering committee, the highest collaboration forum of the Weltwärts programme. Whereas the stakeholders from the global South, particularly receiving organizations, are not represented in this committee, their expert status is denied. This exclusion has been identified and criticized as an asymmetry of (post-colonial) power (e.g., Haas, 2020).

Thus, the role of the actors in the global North has been institutionalized as programme designers, teachers, helpers, or development deliverers. In contrast, partner organizations are mostly reduced to a receiving and mere implementing role. Moreover, the efforts and contributions of the organizations in the South, when noted, are located mostly at an emotional level, as Kontzi (2011, 2015) has shown extensively. Such interpretation of the partner organizations’ roles and contributions has a historical, cultural, and political background we aim to address through our analysis.

From the receiving organizations’ point of view, international volunteers’ contributions are welcome and appreciated as ‘complementary’ (Lough, 2014) or as ‘added value’ (Lough & Matthew, 2013), but not always essential. Nevertheless, significant efforts are made by those organizations’ personnel, mentors, hosting families, and even beneficiaries to create a satisfying volunteering experience (Fuchs, 2020). By analysing the actions, practices, and efforts of receiving organizations in Jalisco, Mexico, our study offers a nuanced view of the activities that are often made invisible or ignored by policymakers, practitioners, and academia in the global North.

III. The German Weltwärts Programme in Jalisco, Mexico

The Weltwärts programme was introduced in 2007 by the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). Its institutional structure today spans multiple actors, whereas the ministry oversees and funds the programme. A coordination office and approximately 160 sending organizations, their partner organizations, and thousands of placements for volunteers in the global South, participate in the programme (Haas, 2020).

All the so-called developing countries are defined by the programme as possible receiving countries. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, approximately 60 countries were receiving ca. 3.500 Weltwärts volunteers every year (Weltwärts, n.d.). The programme is currently resuming activities in several locations. Its target group is young adults aged between 18 and 28. The assignment period varies between 6 and 24 months; however, the average assignment period is 12 months (BMZ, 2014, p. 3).

Lough and Tiessen (2018) identified four levels of differences in international volunteering programmes: (a) goals and aims; (b) duration of assignment; (c) individual vs groups; and (d) age, education, and skill requirements. Regarding the first level, the Weltwärts programme combines all three typologies of international volunteering aims that Plewes and Stuart (2007) have developed: (a) the ‘Development Model;’ (b) the ‘Learning Model’; and (c) the ‘Civil Society Strengthening Model’. While Weltwärts volunteers are mainly described as learners concerning cultural understanding or global citizenship, many see their role on the development model level. They want to promote social and economic development through poverty reduction (Stern & Scheller, 2011). The programme’s overall goals are linked to the Sustainable Development Goals. Additionally, Weltwärts aims to contribute ‘to strengthening civil society structures in the partner countries and Germany’ (Weltwärts, 2016, p. 4).

We argue that, due to these features, Weltwärts represents an interesting case for analysing the efforts and activities of receiving organizations, as it combines several characteristics in which they play an important role: Volunteers want to contribute to development, but they also learn, which raises questions about the role of the receiving organizations and other actors in these processes. Having quite a young target group with a relatively long stay of 12 months requires resources by the organizations.

Mexico is among the Weltwärts’ top 10 receiving countries. Between the programme’s introduction and the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, 1.449 volunteers were assigned by 34 German sending organizations to placement in this country. These organizations collaborate with 175 local receiving organizations (Weltwärts, n.d.). A total of 13 of them are in the State of Jalisco, in the central-western part of Mexico, which is one of the most economically and culturally important federal entities in the country. Most of the Jalisco’s receiving organizations are based in the city of Guadalajara, the state’s capital and Mexico’s third-largest metropolitan area.

In total, 12 out of 13 Jalisco-based organizations participated in the study. One can argue that our sample is reasonably representative of the presence of the Weltwärts programme in Mexico, as far as the type of activities and their frequency are concerned. ² The work with vulnerable populations is the most frequent engagement area (nine sites); within this category, the organizations that work with children (in educational facilities and shelters) are by far the most common (six sites). Environmental organizations and human rights/civic engagement organizations are represented less frequently (four sites), which also reflects the situation in Mexico as a whole.

To understand the complexities of the volunteer-receiving networks, we also interviewed the mentors from the three intermediary organizations that are active in Jalisco and work with the Weltwärts programme. Additionally, we realized a focus group interview with three couples that served as host parents, a focus group interview with 15 students of 5th and 6th grades at an educational facility, and three one-to-one interviews with the beneficiaries of two shelters. ³ Both hosting families and beneficiaries/clients are by far the less visible actors in the volunteer-receiving networks.

Now that we have defined the research problem and presented our sample, we will briefly outline our theoretical lens.

IV. Decolonial Theory and the Politics and Ethics of Care

Development practice and V4D have been increasingly criticized for being embedded into ongoing relations of dominance and therefore representing a continued expression of post- or neo-colonialism (Crush, 1995; Eriksson Baaz, 2005; Haas & Moinina, 2021; Kapoor, 2008; Kerner, 1999; Ziai, 2012). The concept of development is historically based on the idea that Europe represents the economic, cultural, and social norm from which the former colonies deviate (Ziai, 2012, p. 4). This idea has been linked to the construction of racial difference and has served ultimately as justification for exploitation (do Mar Castro Varela & Dhawan, 2005, p. 23). It has been argued that such logics and mechanisms are still implicitly present in the contemporary development sector’s discourse and practice (e.g., Bendix, 2013; Ziai, 2012, 2014). Therefore, post-colonial theory has been widely employed in scholarship on V4D, as it aims to deconstruct discursive and material practices, as well as cultural strategies in a post-colonial world. However, we argue that for the purpose of our study, the decolonial approach, following Latin American thinkers such as Quijano, is a more fruitful one, as this perspective emphatically addresses action, labour, and economic power relations.

Decolonial theory has emerged in the Latin American context and is strongly linked to world-systems theory and the Frankfurt School tradition (Acosta, 2019, p. 17). One of its central concepts is the coloniality of power, introduced by Quijano (1999), and based on the theoretical junction of two concepts: ‘modernity’ and ‘coloniality’. ‘Coloniality’ is a deep-rooted cultural heritage of European colonialism that still defines power relations, both globally and locally (Mendoza, 2020). Colonialism (as a historical phenomenon) and coloniality (as a Eurocentric matrix of power) are not peripheral side-effects of Western modernity, but rather its pivotal elements that have structured several dimensions of the modern world-system. Next to race and racism (that associates the colonizer with rationality while representing the colonized as the colonizer’s irrational counterpart), the dimension that is of interest to our inquiry is the control of labour within the capitalist enterprise. Based on the idea of racial difference a new structure of labour was articulated in which Europeans granted themselves the right to commodify the ‘others’ into the colonized unwaged labour force of the world market (Quijano, 2008).

Mignolo (2000) has extended the discussion on the colonial matrix of power exploring dimensions such as politics (control of authority), economics (control of resources), and subjectivity (control of mentalities), among others. In this regard, the notion of coloniality of power helps us to understand why still today, within the development architecture that is based on the colonial division of the world, some contributions are considered professional and worthy to be waged, and others—like those of the receiving organizations of development volunteers—are not. Decolonial theory here, like post-colonial thinking, aims ‘to discover the historical continuity of the colonial logic in the configuration of power locally and globally in the present’ (Mendoza, 2020, p. 49).

While it is crucial to locate the object of our inquiry in the context of coloniality, it is also important to recognize the receiving organizations’ efforts mainly as care activities offered to the young volunteers. The concept of care comes with its own additional cultural, political, and economic implications, as the perspective of politics and ethics of care has shown extensively.

For more than two decades, the concept of care has attracted the attention of the social sciences. The prominence of care as a notion in several disciplinary fields has contributed to the expansion and the problematization of its meaning (Alber & Drotbohm, 2015). ‘Care work’ can refer to diverse remunerative occupations in medical services, educational institutions, or service trade, but it can also mean unpaid activities, such as housekeeping or informal childcare, that are frequently perceived as private, and thus remain mainly invisible as work.

Care is a complex concept because as a social practice, it crosses informal and institutionalized settings, and it can be defined both in relation to the sphere of labour and in relation to shaping and maintaining social bonds and administering emotions and affects (Adler, 2014; Hochschild, 1983). Thus, it destabilizes the modern distinctions between the public and the private, the rational and the emotional, and the activities that are considered work and those that are not. As a result, those who realize care activities tend to be socially located in the grey zone between categories and are not always recognized as economic and political subjects (Betthyány, 2020; Borgeaud-Garciandía, 2018).

In this sense, the problematization of care as a social practice is consistent with the decolonial theory’s critique of modernity and of the colonial (colonized) subject. Although rarely applied together, both perspectives share certain assumptions and insights. First, both frameworks aspire to visibilize subjects that, for historical reasons, tend to be obscured as such: both the colonial subject and the caregiver tend to be traditionally understood as lesser subjects, in the sense of their sovereignty and agency. Second, the concept of work is central for both frameworks, as it allows the critique of power relations that underlie the distinction between activities that are interpreted as work in a political and economic sense and those that are not. From the decolonial perspective, this distinction can be traced back to the colonial classification of population, which associated the colonized with unwaged labour while turning paid labour into the privilege of the Europeans (Quijano, 2000, p. 539). From the perspective of care politics and ethics, care activities as work are historically similarly problematic, as they are associated with informality and emotions, and tend to have feminine connotations, thus undermining the political and economic importance of such activities.

One can argue that the subjects of our study operate in a context still marked by the coloniality of power, both locally and in a more global sense. In this specific context, they take the role of volunteers’ caretakers, which renders their position additionally complex. Our analysis seeks to elucidate these complexities and offer a nuanced account of the hosting partners’ contributions.

V. Findings

In this section, we present our core findings that shed light on the agency and efforts of the receiving partners. The main themes include (a) preparing the ground for the volunteers’ activities, (b) ensuring the volunteers’ well-being during the stay, and (c) turning volunteering into a learning experience. These findings point out several broader issues associated with the decolonial perspective and the politics of care, which are then discussed in the following section.

Preparing the Ground

Negotiating Over the Volunteers’ Activities

According to most respondents, the success of the volunteering experience depends on finding a balance between the volunteers’ interests and the needs of the receiving organization. In many cases, the negotiation starts long before the volunteers’ arrival: The hosts prepare the ground through questionnaires and interviews. Far from being an initial one-time decision, the volunteers’ incorporation is presented by the interviewees as a permanent and complex process. The hosts not only consider the volunteers’ wishes but also closely observe their performance and intervene when a change of activity is needed:

We observe them: what they [the volunteers] like to do, what they don’t like to do, what they find more difficult, with whom they get along well. […] You must ask yourself why each person is here, if they are students, if they only want to work part-time. You must design the mentoring process accordingly. You must adjust it to those needs. Each case is different and so is the volunteering experience. (Ana, ⁴ coordinator in a refugee and migrant care center) ⁵

An important limitation of the incorporation process is the volunteers’ immaturity and lack of professional experience. Therefore, they play mostly a supportive role, and they are never a substitute for a professional, partly because their presence cannot be taken for granted:

I cannot give them [the volunteers] a position of responsibility or make them a supervisor of an area because I cannot be sure if the young man wouldn’t leave tomorrow or maybe he can’t stand the family separation and prefers to go home. We prefer to put them in charge of specific things, which, although important, are not vital for the functioning of the institution. (David, educator in a care center for children from vulnerable families) ⁶

Several hosts make clear that there are limits to the negotiation over the volunteers’ interests and wishes. Some volunteers arrive with unrealistic expectations that cannot be met due to the specifics of the organization’s dynamics: they may want to realize activities that are irrelevant or that suppose a structural strain for the institution. In such cases, the hosts try to conciliate, but only as far as it does not compromise the organizational interests.

Whereas the hosts settle the conditions of the volunteers’ integration into the receiving organization, the mentors negotiate with the volunteers over the housing and/or the hosting family choice. While settling for lodging, the mentors seek to offer the volunteers a balance between freedom/independence and security/care. They understand that, as young adults, the volunteers arrive with expectations that must be at least partially fulfilled to make the volunteering experience satisfactory.

Training and Coaching

While praising the volunteers’ enthusiasm and their disposition to help, the hosts highlight the necessity of preparing them for their activities. A training period, which in some cases takes up to 3 months, is considered a necessary investment of time and effort to make the volunteers ‘productive’ for the organization. The host organizations offer workshops and informative meetings, and more personalized training strategies to facilitate the volunteers’ incorporation.

Teaching volunteers about organizational proceedings and dynamics takes time, as does coaching them into obeying the rules and the standards of the institution. These are especially important in social assistance organizations, where many regulations are in place to protect beneficiaries’ integrity. More generally, according to the respondents, the volunteers’ commitment to the organization cannot be taken for granted. In some cases, the volunteers must be reminded about their responsibilities on a regular basis. Training and coaching are portrayed as a permanent activity rather than an initial short-term effort.

Institutional Procedures and Communication with Sending Organizations

Preparing the ground for the reception of the volunteers includes formalities and institutional procedures that several respondents perceive as time-consuming. Bigger and more established organizations have an administrative area that takes care of the application procedures, evaluations, elaboration of manuals and protocols, and communication with mentors or sending organizations. In smaller organizations one member of staff is typically responsible for such activities, which can range from taking care of the volunteers’ immigration permits to filling out the documents required by the sending organizations.

An important part of the organizational infrastructure that underpins the volunteering experience is the communication between the hosts and the sending organizations and/or the mentors. Most interviewed hosts report that such communication works well as far as practicalities are concerned: they are encouraged to suggest improvements to the incorporation of the volunteers, and they can also report problems or ask for support in solving specific everyday problems, such as health issues or difficulties with the hosting parents. However, they note a difference when serious decision-making on the structural level of the programme is concerned:

We should continue with the spaces of dialogue [organized by the program], […] but above all at the decision-making tables … I don’t know how aggressive or rude it may sound that we [the hosts] want to be there, but it’s not that we want power or something like that. No. Just to be where decisions are made. I think it would really give the program the tonality it needs. (Roberto, volunteers’ mentor) ⁷

Both the hosts and the mentors underscore the importance of investing their time into participating in the international meetings organized by the programme. Interestingly enough, they interpret such events as learning opportunities aimed at the improvement of their skills as volunteers’ caregivers rather than opportunities that benefit their organization or themselves personally.

Ensuring the Volunteers’ Well-being

Logistics of Everyday Life

Taking care of the volunteers’ daily needs is a recurring theme. The respondents mention lodging, transportation, food, medical care, and leisure, but also cultural orientation for the volunteers to acquire skills and attitudes to adapt to their new context.

Important efforts are made to ensure adequate housing. The mentors take into consideration not only the volunteers’ commodity and safety but also their emotional well-being and their social integration. Some prefer to place the volunteers in residential communities, others opt for hosting families hoping to attend to security issues and ensure the volunteers’ access to the local way of life. However, the choice of accommodation is not always successful; based on the volunteers’ feedback, the mentors may look for a new place for multiple reasons, including the volunteers’ safety or their emotional necessities.

Transportation and food are taken care of in a similarly thoughtful and engaging manner. Driving the volunteers to work or accompanying them on the bus are common practices among the hosts and the hosting parents, especially at the beginning of the stay. Host organizations use to offer food to volunteers during their service hours—it is a seemingly minor commitment, but it puts a strain on the finances of smaller organizations. In certain cases, the employees take the initiative and share their daily lunch with the volunteers.

The daily accompaniment also includes immediate help in emergencies, such as medical problems or robberies, and less dramatic forms of support when orientation in the new environment is needed. Besides, almost all the interviewees report being occasionally involved in the planning of the volunteers’ leisure activities. The hosts and the hosting families (and sometimes even the beneficiaries) invite the volunteers to family celebrations, events, and trips. They sometimes integrate volunteers into everyday routines, such as attending a fitness centre.

The mentors organize camps and trips that allow the volunteers to gather and exchange their experiences. They take pride in these events, and they underline their importance for the volunteers’ well-being. The mentors understand such undertakings as part of their honorary activities; however, they admit (reluctantly) that such activities can easily become a financial burden, as the necessary funding for accommodation, food, and transportation is not always available. As in the case of the meals during working hours, the financial aspect of the efforts for the volunteers’ well-being is an awkward topic the interviewees rarely mention, but one they admit they must frequently deal with.

Emotional and Mental Support

The volunteers’ emotional well-being is one of the respondents’ preeminent concerns. Making the volunteers feel welcome and comfortable is a shared effort of the mentors, the hosts, the hosting families, and the beneficiaries.

Many mentors and hosts are social care professionals and therefore well-prepared to handle the volunteers’ emotional and mental difficulties in an informed way. Some mentors draw on their experience as educators, although they admit that working with young Europeans pose challenges that were new to them. The hosts can sometimes apply their skills to address the volunteers’ psychological issues. Two interviewees reported sporadic severe cases, when regular therapy was needed.

While the mentors tend to regard the volunteers as their pupils and the hosts see them occasionally as recipients of psychological care, the hosting parents choose to talk about a ‘temporary adoption’ and insist on calling the volunteers their children. To justify their protective attitudes and efforts, many stakeholders underscore the volunteers’ immaturity and lack of experience in the new context.

Less formal, but equally engaged emotional support comes from the beneficiaries (and sometimes even their families) and from the host organizations’ staff members:

Chayo [the cook] and I [the janitor] are the ones who are watching them the most. Chayo has the clinical eye to say ‘This girl needs to eat better. She is not well. She is suffering’ […] We once had a girl here and we saw she wasn’t well. And we started … especially Chayo, who has a very clinical eye … she told the director: ‘I can see that this person is not well. She is disoriented, out of place’. And then they spoke to her mentor, and he reacted very quickly. (Silvia, janitor in a primary school for the visually impaired) ⁸

Safety

The risk of being a crime victim is part of the daily experience of Mexico’s inhabitants, who learn to adjust their everyday practices to reduce security threats. In the eyes of the mentors and the hosts, the volunteers arrive lacking the necessary awareness of possible dangers and the capacity of handling the risks. One way of dealing with this problem is by organizing formal workshops to teach the volunteers about the perils: walking at night in the city centre, making friends on a bus, traveling alone, or hitchhiking are presented as potentially dangerous practices. On the other hand, less formal but more permanent safety measures include monitoring the volunteers via cell phone messaging and calls. Such vigilance practices are interpreted as awkward but necessary; the hosts are aware that the volunteers may perceive such measures as a privacy infringement. The dilemma of how to protect them without limiting their freedoms is a repetitive theme. But safety comes first; the prospect of a crime scenario involving a volunteer is related by a host as deeply worrying:

We had an ugly experience too. It made us rethink things. We couldn’t find a volunteer! We looked for her here and there, with friends… She had not arrived home, she was very young. Nothing. It turned out that she had gone to the beach with some friends. We didn’t know. So, it is also a lot of responsibility. And we started to think differently. […] Imagine the trouble you get into … a volunteer from our organisation disappears! We are not prepared for such big trouble. (Manuel, head of a human rights NGO) ⁹

Given the constant concern for the safety of the volunteers, the mentors and the hosts feel relieved to share the responsibility with other stakeholders. The hosting families take over some of the protection efforts. A local community may also play a protective role, especially in more precarious neighbourhoods, where informal nets of mutual support based on acquaintance fill in for insufficient institutionalized security.

Despite the security measures, emergencies happen at times, and they must be dealt with in an informed and responsible manner. On one occasion, a relationship between two female volunteers and two young men of criminal background alerted their mentor, who immediately arranged for the volunteers to relocate into safer lodgings. He also took responsibility for allowing them to carry on with their stay, a decision based on sincere and close communication with his mentees and on his knowledge of the Mexican context.

Turning Volunteering into a Learning Experience

Language

Both the mentors and the hosts emphasize the importance of language skills for the success of the volunteering experience. For the mentors, language proficiency is the first step for the cultural immersion that they aspire for their mentees. From the hosts’ point of view, language is indispensable for full involvement in the activities of the organization.

Most volunteers arrive with insufficient Spanish skills. The hosts tolerate the initial difficulties and try to communicate as well as they can, hoping for speedy improvement. One of the interviewees commented that they sometimes even forbid volunteers to speak German during working hours. Another one complained that the progress is much slower when volunteers come in pairs.

On the other hand, the hosts applaud the rapid Spanish learning progress of most volunteers. Working with children and youth is mentioned repeatedly as an opportunity for a spontaneous, ‘horizontal’ language learning experience. Young beneficiaries of shelters and educational facilities recognize their role as everyday language facilitators and underscore the reciprocity of learning: while they see the volunteers as their tutors, they also see themselves as Spanish language experts and take pride in being able to help.

Culture

The interviewed mentors describe themselves mainly as ‘cultural facilitators’. They understand culture both as heritage and as everyday practice, and they arrange volunteers’ activities accordingly. On the one hand, they organize seminars, camps, and trips to ‘teach’ the volunteers about Mexican art, architecture, and festivities; on the other hand, they insist on providing them with opportunities of experiencing the Mexican way of life. One mentor explained that at the beginning ‘his’ volunteers were sharing a flat and they spent their free time together with almost no contact with the locals. In his opinion, that hindered their cultural immersion and he decided to take steps to correct that. Finding hosting families turned out to be a solution, as they offer an insight into everyday life:

I was wondering: ‘How am I going to find out what they [the volunteers] like [to eat]?’ I decided to take them to the market. They tasted everything: pineapple, prickly pear… They fell in love with prickly pears! […] We bought strawberries. Watermelon! The sellers let them taste the fruits and they wouldn’t stop. (Dalia, host mother) ¹⁰

Cultural practices around food are also repeatedly mentioned by the respondents in host organizations. They recall volunteers’ reactions to new flavours and their preferences for certain Mexican dishes. They interpret volunteers’ willingness to share food as a sign of their cultural openness. Not everything revolves around food, though. The mentors, the hosts, and the hosting families invite volunteers to participate in events and celebrations, such as mariachi concerts or Independence Day.

The ‘interculturality’ theme is mentioned a lot, too. Typically, the volunteers’ presence is interpreted as an opportunity for cultural learning on both sides. But almost immediately stereotypes are being confirmed and reinforced: (a) The Germans arrive cold and distant and leave ‘latinized’, capable of expressing their feelings, more loving and caring. (b) Germans are honest and direct, while Mexicans tend to circumlocution and do not say things as they are. Both stereotypes are frequently narrated as transformational tales (cold and distant Germans ‘latinized’, Mexicans learning to be direct and honest); the intercultural encounter is interpreted as a process of change. The respondents see themselves as deeply involved in it, both as those who bring about change in others and as those who are willing to change themselves.

Personal and Vocational Growth

The volunteers’ personal development is one of the mentors’ priorities. They frequently meet the volunteers individually or in a group, and they also encourage reflection and dialogue over the new experiences. As trained educators, they try not to cross the fine line between assistance and vigilance. While constantly available for supporting the volunteers’ development, they try to avoid overprotection and interference. Nevertheless, occasional interventions take place when the mentors note volunteers’ reluctance to ‘get out of their comfort zone’ and to face the challenges of the new circumstances. Learning to be independent and to be ‘responsible for their freedom’, to explore their identity, personality, interests, and aspirations—these are the aspects of the personal development mentioned by both the mentors and the hosting parents.

While the mentors encourage and accompany the volunteers’ personal growth, host organizations provide the opportunity for gaining work experience. Most respondents agree that participating in the organizations’ activities helps the volunteers choose their future careers and grow vocationally. The volunteers learn by doing, of course, but they also profit from the knowledge and skills of the staff, who are frequently experts in their fields. Also, as far as possible, the hosts arrange volunteers’ activities to cover a broad range of tasks. During their one-year’s stay, they are given the opportunity to perform in different areas in order to encourage a complete and versatile working experience.

Several respondents observe that the involvement in everyday organizational practice faces the volunteers with ethical complexities of social work that allow them to reflect and to mature as persons. Frequently, especially at the beginning, the newcomers confront their ethical presuppositions with the ethics of the organization. In such cases, the hosts underscore the importance of trying to explain the organization’s politics and decisions, so that the volunteers can relate to them. In social assistance organizations, the hosts keep a close eye on the interactions between the volunteers and the beneficiaries trying to guarantee respectful and fair treatment of the beneficiaries. The ethical challenges of the work with ‘vulnerable populations’ (such as children or migrants) include avoiding intimate relationships that can easily violate the integrity of the beneficiaries. Another ethical challenge is being just and fair to everyone:

I tell them [the volunteers]: ‘I understand that you [the volunteer] can see that there are a lot of clothes, but behind this person you are serving, there are 500 more. So, yes, you can give them three pairs of trousers, but those three pairs of trousers would have been useful to someone else. The same with the food. […] The same thing you give to one person here, you will have to give to 50 other people. We [the organisation] have equal treatment for everyone. (Ana, host in a refugee and migrant care center) ¹¹

The work with vulnerable populations can have an eye-opening effect on the volunteers according to several respondents: witnessing poverty, (structural) violence, and other kinds of social injustice make them value/judge their own privilege. That is why some hosts encourage the volunteers’ participation in organizational activities that expose them to difficult realities, such as visiting extreme poverty neighbourhoods or violence-ridden areas, even if it means taking additional responsibility for the volunteers’ well-being and safety.

VI. Discussion

Our study sheds new light on hosting partners’ positionality within the V4D architecture. First, the analysis points out the complexity of the volunteer-related activities and processes and makes visible a dense network of assistance that includes both actors that are commonly recognized as receiving partners (such as hosts and mentors) and those who remain much less visible (such as host families, beneficiaries or ‘fringe players’ such as cooks or cleaning personnel in the organizations). Second, the study shows the interviewed stakeholders as deeply reflexive subjects, who not only learn constantly and analyse the nuances of their volunteer-related efforts and practices but also have a wide-ranging professional experience and a broad knowledge of the local context that allows them to handle the volunteers’ situation. Third, the findings highlight the agency of the stakeholders, as they show their initiative and creativity while managing volunteer-related issues, and their readiness to take responsibility in difficult situations. In the following paragraphs, we discuss the main findings in more detail.

The volunteer-related efforts come to light as time-intensive and complex. The volunteers’ integration into the new context turns out to be based on prolonged assistance by the receiving partners. The hosts and the mentors refer to most aspects of the volunteering experience as processes that they actively accompany drawing on their professional experience. Two examples of such long-term efforts are finding a balance between the volunteers’ interests and the needs of the receiving organization or shaping the volunteering as a learning experience. Hosting parents, as well as receiving organizations’ beneficiaries and clients are among the frequently invisibilized actors, who nonetheless play an important role in the volunteers’ integration. The volunteers’ well-being, their cultural learning, and even their safety depend on a dense network of actors that participate in the process, both formally and informally. Such networks of care, as documented by our study, challenge the still common imagery of the receiving organizations as ‘stage settings’ in that the volunteering experience unfolds spontaneously. They also highlight broader issues associated with the decolonial perspective and the theoretical lens of the politics and ethics of care: the tendency to obscure the complexity of the efforts of volunteers’ caretakers operating in a context still marked by the coloniality of power can only be fully understood within the historical configuration of power relations that have located the caregiver and the colonized as inferior subjects.

Furthermore, the findings allow us to observe the local partners’ reflexivity related to the volunteers’ presence. Several aspects of the volunteers’ assistance are narrated as negotiations that take skill, experience, and insight. For example, while negotiating the volunteers’ placement and activities, hosts and mentors attempt to understand their motivations and wishes, but they also regularly observe the volunteers’ performance to make sure that both the volunteers’ personal growth and the organization’s interests are taken care of. Another example is the security issue: protecting the volunteers without infringing their privacy or freedom demands not only sensibility and knowledge of the local context, but also the capacity to build trust so that honest and unhindered communication can take place anytime. There is also the example of cultural learning and vocational growth: the mentors and the hosting parents repeatedly reflect on the difficult balance between assistance and allowing the volunteers to learn freely from experience. They do not take volunteers’ learning processes for granted and watch closely over their willingness to ‘leave their comfort zone’ and ‘to be responsible for their freedom’, intervening when needed. Such insightful and reflexive assistance is not a coincidence, as most mentors and hosts are educators or social service professionals with experience that allows them to handle the complexities of the volunteers’ situation. Thus, our findings allow a further critique of the tendency to represent care work as non-essential, informal activities with emotional connotations.

The host organizations’ institutional context is of importance, too: most of them have been active for years in the field of social work, their structure is based on experience and knowledge of the local context, and they actively adjust their structures and dynamics to receive the volunteers. Considering the informed and engaged assistance that our findings corroborate, it is difficult not to interpret the systematic exclusion of southern stakeholders from (most) decision-making processes and formalized steering structures as one of the still remaining asymmetries produced by the coloniality of power.

Finally, the findings show the stakeholders as agents involved in a dense network of assistance. They actively participate in the configuring of the organizational infrastructure that underpins the volunteering experience. Thanks to their initiative new elements are added to the volunteers’ agenda: accommodation in hosting families, organizing special events, taking care of volunteers’ leisure, or attending their psychological needs are examples of initiatives that come not only from the ‘official’ stakeholders (such as mentors and hosts), but also from other actors, such as beneficiaries, staff members, or even neighbourhood dwellers.

The local stakeholders understand themselves as doers not only in the sense of organizing the volunteers’ activities, but also in the sense of transferring knowledge and skills. The hosts and the mentors design workshops and trainings to facilitate the volunteers’ integration, but they also see themselves as teachers in everyday situations, when the ethics of social work must be discussed, or cultural practices explained. Hosting parents and beneficiaries/clients associate their teaching role especially with language and cultural skills. The responsibility the local stakeholders take for the well-being and the learning processes of the volunteers is another important aspect of their active attitude. Making certain decisions about the volunteers’ situation, especially when related to their safety, can be a burden that the mentors and the hosts accept as part of their role as the volunteers’ caregivers.

It is noteworthy that hardly any respondent refers to such productive and essential activities as ‘work’. A need for remuneration is never mentioned and the interviewees tend to minimize their contributions, occasionally even expressing their embarrassment about the limited re- sources their organizations can offer to their volunteers. Seen through our theoretical lens, such lacking recognition of their own efforts appears problematic. It reveals the discrepancy between the actual hosting partners’ contributions and their valuation, even by the actors themselves. We claim that such discrepancies can be understood considering the historical and cultural processes that have produced the common valorisation of certain activities as work, while other activities remain invisible in terms of labour. In this context, images and representations of V4D programmes based on the distinction between the so-called developed and developing worlds and the separation between the givers and the receivers prevail and so the under-representation and disregard for southern stakeholders’ role, efforts, and activities still shape the stakeholders’ understanding of the V4D architecture.

VII. Conclusion

Our study shows that receiving partners’ efforts, far from being sporadic or spontaneous, are considered part of their organizational dynamics and are supported by the professional experience of those involved. Host organizations are happy about the complementary contributions of volunteers. They value the volunteers’ everyday work and their innovative insights into the organizations’ routines; they also appreciate the ‘intercultural’ aspects of the international volunteers’ presence and recognize their importance for the organizations’ prestige. Still, they must invest diverse resources to integrate volunteers into institutional dynamics, accompany them emotionally, equip them with cultural knowledge, and guarantee their safety to make volunteering experiences a success. To put it in other words: local actors and stakeholders are consciously and unconsciously, collectively and individually, but constantly weaving a dense, sophisticated, and enabling assistance and safety web around the volunteers. A web of efforts, contributions, knowledge, resources, and professionalism, of which most elements are usually not monetized and are mainly invisible in the discussion of international volunteering programmes. Nonetheless, this web paves the way for the volunteer experience and work to come to life in the first place.

The research shows, inter alia, the receiving partners’ reflexivity, knowledge, and experience; these qualities remain mostly unrecognized on the programmes’ structural level. While appreciated as an operative value in specific situations, they are frequently unrecognized as an asset in designing the programme rules and agendas or in the decisions on future directions and new instruments. Thus, the distinction between the enlightened givers and the inexpert receivers persists in structural terms. Our study also reveals the discrepancy between the actual hosting partners’ contributions and their valuation, even by the actors themselves. We relate this discrepancy to the role that the hosting partners play as volunteers’ caretakers in a context that remains marked by the coloniality of power.

The under-representation and disregard for southern partners’ roles, efforts, and activities still shape the stakeholder’s understanding of the V4D architecture, both on the sending and on the receiving side. Including Southern host organizations into the steering spaces of V4D programmes, such as steering committees, would be a real opportunity for power-sharing and altering current power imbalances in decision-making, mutual recognition and knowledge production. As a representative from a South African Weltwärts host organization once put it in the words of a common decolonial claim: ‘Nothing About Us Without Us’ (Stewart, 2017, p. 93).

Our findings not only question the positionality of the host organizations but also challenge the development aid discourse and practice and the positionality of northern volunteers within the development architecture. Ultimately, our contribution offers new propositions for a future (critical) research agenda by calling for more decolonial approaches within the scholarship on volunteering. Applying the Latin American perspective of decoloniality will introduce a new critical view into the V4D discussion, which traditional post-colonial thinkers dominate.