Ethical Engagement with Animals on Gap Year Experiences by Nora Livingstone, Animal Experience International (AEI) If your program connects with community-based organizations that work with animals, and you want to follow best practices and avoid common pitfalls to students volunteering with animals, please read on for some valuable resources. If you’re a potential gap year student interested in volunteering with animals and interested in ethical best practices for doing so, we hope that this blog will be a useful resource for you as well. While planning to work with animals, consider their wellbeing using the following framework. There are 5…
Service-Learning
A Bite Into the Big Apple Our Food Justice Cookbook and Reflections on our Food and Sustainability Focused Gap Year Semester by Clara Pitt and Leila Tilin We chose to spend the first half of our gap year semester with the Living City Project (LCP) investigating the NYC food system, its inner workings, and the people and organizations that are fighting for justice and change within this system. We felt guided by one question specifically: How can we build a sustainable and equitable food system that respects our diversity, nourishes our citizens, and protects our planet? We chose to study…
Taking an Intentional Gap Year Through AmeriCorps Service by Ally Bush For some, taking a gap year can be intimidating. You’re just out of high school or a recent college graduate, unsure of where to take your next step. Travel is an option, but it can be expensive. Doing an internship is an alternative, but often, internships are unpaid and can be highly competitive. For Justin Harrison, an AmeriCorps service term seemed like the perfect fit. Justin was two years into a four-year degree at New York University, but he was stressed about his future. He had realized that engineering…
Holistic and Sustainable Travel by Sydney Yelton With gap years on the rise, and people becoming comfortable traveling across borders again, it’s time to seriously think about the way we traveled in the past, and how we want travel to look like today and in the future. The global pandemic has given travel a new platform. There has been an opportunity, just like every other industry and system within our world, for the people to re-evaluate our actions and ideas around travel. We can either treat this time as a reset, a chance to be better, or stick to old…
How a Gap Year Can Align With Your Career Goals by Adam Salzman, Adventure EXP It’s incredibly exciting to have the opportunity to take on a gap year, but even more thrilling is knowing it aligns with your personal and professional goals. Choosing an alternative path from the normal status quo of high school, college, and internships is a wonderful opportunity to challenge yourself in a way that others won’t experience, but it can be daunting. It goes deeper than just having an amazing experience. It’s a great first step in your career, but also for future opportunities, whether travel…
Why we Discourage Orphanage Volunteering and What to do Instead by GYA Admin Last month World Nomads published an excellent article about orphanage tourism and why it should be avoided. At the GYA we are heavily invested in raising the ethical bar on service learning, across the board for gap year programs and students. That’s one of the primary goals of our accreditation process and one of the reasons that we encourage gap year counselors and students to thoroughly vet the organizations they choose to partner with around the world. Having good intentions is not enough. We are responsible for…
Carpe Diem Education: Six Months in Ecuador, Peru, and Tanzania by Jack D, shared with us by Carpe Diem Education. You can read the original here. “So, how was your year abroad?” It’s a loaded question, and one that I still – three months after landing back in New Orleans – struggle to answer adequately. I haven’t given up, though; whenever it comes up, I sing the year’s praises as loudly as possible. “It was absolutely phenomenal. I’d recommend it to anyone. Complete game-changer. The greatest year of my life.” But really – how do you describe an experience like this?…
Volunteering During your Gap Year: The Refugee Crisis by Sophia De Bruin Over one million people were forced to flee to Europe in 2015, according to a report from the United Nations Refugee Agency. Ongoing conflict and violence in Syria, Iraq and other parts of the world is causing many to risk the perilous journey over the Mediterranean to Europe in their attempts to reach safety. The European Union has struggled to cope with the crisis since April 2015, when the number of deaths at sea rose to record levels and asylum applications increased by more than 80% from the…
What Does Responsible International Volunteering Look Like? by Annie Wendel Record numbers of students are choosing to study, travel, and serve abroad through Gap Year organizations, alternative break programs, and tour agencies. Voluntourism, volunteering and traveling at the same time, has become a popular rite of passage for high school and college-aged students. As a former study abroad participant and international volunteer, I can vouch for the personal, professional, and academic benefits of these intercultural immersion and exchange programs. These programs supplement classroom lessons through experiential learning opportunities and build student global awareness. My personal experiences have also made me…
On Raising the Bar for Service Learning An interview with Willy Oppenheim, Founder of Omprakash One of the presentations I attended at the GYA Annual Conference in Boston was on Service Learning, presented by Willy Oppenheim of Omprakash. His reputation as a powerhouse presenter, a passionate humanitarian and an adventurer extraordinaire preceded him. I was not disappointed. I walked away from his presentation inspired and grateful that someone was standing up to say the hard things and encourage the community towards a higher standard across the board. Service learning is a sticky subject in the gap year world and there…