South America Volunteer Guide

General Info

Free and low-cost volunteer opportunities in South & Central America.

The site is designed for backpackers /independent travellers looking for a real volunteer experience abroad, without paying any middle-man or agency fees.

Finding volunteer work that didn't involve paying a middle-man/third party a large amount of cash was much more difficult than I anticipated; the result was many happy hours searching on Google, travel forums and obscure spanish-language websites for a suitable volunteer work program.

In the end, for various reasons, I didn't volunteer in 2005; but I had found a handful of interesting volunteer programs and realised that lots of other people were in the same boat as myself - looking for genuine grass-roots volunteer work in South America. I didn't want my 40+ manhours of research to go to waste so I posted what I'd found on volunteerargentina.net, which later became volunteersouthamerica.net.