Volunteering abroad with Moving Mountains is an opportunity to immerse yourself in a foreign culture while giving back to the communities. We are always looking for skilled volunteers to help us with a wide variety of tasks including data collection, teaching, child education, medicine, and much more. If you’re looking for a career break, you're just out of university, or you’re hoping to begin a career in development, we encourage you to apply to volunteer in Kenya or volunteer in Nepal with Moving Mountains.
Volunteering Abroad with Moving Mountains: What We Need
Moving Mountains has three main offices, the main office in the UK, and then Moving Mountains Nepal and Moving Mountains Kenya. On the ground in Kenya and Nepal, our offices are staffed entirely by locals, many of whom have been trained by Moving Mountains. This allows us to work closely with local communities and ensures that the work we do is driven by the needs of the community, not the desires of outsiders.
However, it also means that we often need volunteers to assist with different tasks, be that accounting, social media, grant applications, or even capacity building. Due to this, we are often looking for skilled, trained professionals to come and work with us for two weeks to two months or even longer.
For those thinking of volunteering in Nepal or Kenya, we need help collecting data and pulling together analysis of expenditure and impact reports on our projects. This information is used to show donors how we are using our funding. It is an essential part of running an open and effective charity. This kind of volunteer work is great for young professionals hoping to start a career in international development or in the non-profit sector.
We also do a lot of work with schools and clinics. When we have volunteer teachers or volunteer education professionals come to Kenya or Nepal, we encourage them to help us run skills transfer workshops or capacity building work for children and adults. Teachers and other education professionals can also help us run after school programs or extra curricular activities.
Beyond these assignments, we also accept volunteers who are medical professionals looking to help work in clinics abroad or volunteer in a hospital setting. Additionally, we can use help from special needs educators, communications professionals, IT, management, and more.
If you are looking for a volunteering opportunity in Kenya or Nepal, please contact us to see how you could fit in with our programs!
Volunteering Abroad Benefits The Community
Our volunteer programs, just like our other adventure travel expeditions and trips, are designed to be as effective as possible. Your time in country will be used well and will be organized with the input from the project leaders and local authorities on the ground.
We believe that volunteer work should not exploit or take advantage of local people and local groups. For this reason, our long term volunteers never take the place of a local worker. We need volunteers to help us with tasks that people on the ground cannot yet perform. Even better, we need volunteers to help train and educate our staff on the ground to do the work themselves.
In order to make sure your time as a volunteer is used efficiently, we provide plenty of training and opportunities for learning ahead of your time in country. You’ll become familiar with our programs and our day-to-day operations so that you can hit the ground running and make the most out of your time volunteering abroad.
Does Volunteering Abroad Cost Money?
We do charge a fee for our volunteering trips as well as a fundraising requirement per week of volunteering. The fee covers all the costs of your logistics during your time in country, as well as giving you a stipend to spend while on the ground.
The fundraising requirement helps us to ensure that your work as a volunteer has a long lasting impact and is not exploiting the local populations we work with. With the fundraising money, we are able to pay salaries for our skilled laborers, fund new projects needed by our communities, and continue to work towards our long term development goals.
Moving Mountains has been working in Kenya and Nepal for over twenty years. Our projects don’t span weeks or even months, but rather years and decades. Development goals take time to be reached. We need volunteers like you to help us reach them, but we also need funding to help ensure that the work of volunteers has an impact well into the future.
Volunteering in Kenya or Nepal is the experience of a lifetime. It is an opportunity to work with local people on sustainable projects. For the community, it is a chance for them to learn a new skill and meet someone from a foreign culture. For you, the volunteer, it is an opportunity to forge cross cultural friendships that may last a lifetime, and to have memories you can carry with you well into the future.