How Long Should You Volunteer? Here’s the Best Way to Assess Your Volunteer Time ommitment

Last Updated on August 10, 2023

How long you volunteer for is entirely personal, but your volunteer time commitment has a large effect on which type of volunteering is right for you. There is a debate to be made about if you should even volunteer for most types of international volunteering.

There are only specific scenarios where volunteering abroad is a good choice, and it varies by every single country, type of project, and type of volunteer. That said, if you’re wondering how long to volunteer for to reap the benefits of volunteering—we’ll that’s suprisingly low!

To truly understand the various scenarios that you will encounter, and to accurately judge if you have enough time to volunteer, first study the ethics of the international volunteering industry, as well as the politics and economics of the developing world. Then we’ll look at what volunteer time commitment yields the best benefits for the volunteer, as well as those their working with.

Only once you have a good foundational knowledge can you determine how long you should volunteer to have a positive impact on the place you’re visiting.

Best Volunteer Time Commitment for Personal Benefits

The benefits you derive from volunteering vary depending on individual circumstances, the nature of the volunteer work, and the organization involved. And it depends on if you’re approaching your an international volunteer trip as a one-off, or if its integrated into your life both abroad and at home.

The fact is, no amount of volunteering guarantees you will experience personal benefits, but the research does suggest that even relatively short volunteer time commitments yield positive effects, according to BMC Public Health. This is true for older adults, for whom it counters loneliness and fosters increased connection, and for younger volunteers hoping to increase their paid work prospects.

Here’s what the science says about the you side of volunteering—how long you should volunteer for to see benefits. It’s a whole different ball game when we talk about how long to volunteer in impoverished communities overseas.

Short-Term Volunteering

Even a few hours of volunteering can lead to improved mood, increased self-esteem, and a sense of social connectedness. A study published in Psychological Science found that as little as two hours of volunteering per week was associated with greater life satisfaction and happiness. That means you’re committing about 100 hours per year to volunteer work.

That’s a pretty easy time commitment for most, either for those volunteering in their local communities, or for a digital nomad hunkered down in one spot for a few months or years.

Moderate-Term Volunteering

Engaging in volunteer work for a few months or more can provide deeper social connections, skill development, and a sense of purpose. Research published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior showed that volunteers who commit to longer periods of service tend to experience more positive outcomes, such as enhanced well-being and improved health.

Basically, you need a regular time commitment across months, not days to see the most personal benefit to your mental and physical health. And if you’re a single person who doesn’t get out much, the benefits stack up even faster if you commit more time to volunteering.

For international travelers, this means take a sabbatical and planning a six-month stint somewhere, versus popping in for a week or two.

Long-Term Volunteering

Long-term volunteering, spanning a year or more, may lead to profound personal growth, skill acquisition, and a strong sense of community involvement—more so than compared to those who volunteered for a short time, according to the Journal of Behavioral Sciences. This is especially true for older adults who volunteered regularly over a longer period reported increased levels of life satisfaction and mental well-being.

For others, volunteering positively contributes to happiness levels by increasing empathic emotions and shifting aspirations according to a study in the Journal of Social Science & Medicine. 

Ultimately, as one might expect, the personal benefits of volunteering are cumulative, but also depend the type of work, the organization’s mission, and your personal goals. To maximize the benefits from your volunteer time commitment, choose volunteer opportunities that align with your interests and values.

How Long Should You Volunteer For?

Remember, you can best assess this once you have the foundational knowledge mentioned above. Then you should honestly evaluate your trip to decide which type of service—because you don’t have to volunteer to be of service while you travel—is right for your trip.

Should you volunteer for one day?

Are you sure volunteering is the best fit for your trip? Short vacations for those with just a day or two of service are often a part of organized tours. Consider instead practicing socially responsible tourism on your independent trip by supporting grassroots businesses: cafes, artists, tour operators, hotels, and local workshops.

With just a few days of service, social enterprises and locally run or community-organized day tours are a fantastic option to feel good about the way you spend your money on the road. Remember, you can’t do much in a day, but single-day volunteer opportunities can contribute to a total cumulative benefit when picked wisely and when they keep the issues of dependency and dignity in mind.

A few examples of daylong volunteer experiences to consider are things like: language/conversations exchanges, beach cleanups, construction or outdoor work that just needs warm bodies (think Habitat for Humanity), and other situations like this, where it’s not necessary to volunteer for very long because the experiences are designed to host a rotating cast of short-term volunteers.

Should you volunteer for a week?

Again, I ask: Is volunteering is the best fit for your trip? Consider how you can make your vacation a service-learning trip by traveling responsibly and spending money directly in local communities, and in support of socially responsible business. While it is possible to find ethical short-term volunteer opportunities, these are often most effective for highly skilled volunteers offering medical, financial, or other specialized skills. You can truly have an impactful vacation by traveling responsibly.

You can also really have an impact by picking an off-the-beaten-path location for your vacation. Many of the world’s most popular destinations suffer from overtourism, and it’s only worsening every year. Picking offbeat vacation destinations makes for incredible vacation memories, unique adventures, and also spreads your money into locations and countries where ever tourism dollar has a more profound effect on the local economy.

That said, if you are dead-set on adding service to your trip, choose wisely and be sure you are not simply painting a school, or some such. Search for a service-based tour operator that focuses a week of your trip on volunteering. Or, go independent and arrange a week of service directly through an organization near your vacation spot—you could even make volunteering your entire vacation. Either option works! Search our database of vetted independent volunteer organizations to find something that fits your timeframe. Remember, the longer you can stay the larger your impact.

Examples of weeklong volunteer experiences that could have a positive impact include: workshops to train others in your highly specialized skills, organizational/office work for non-profit, small building projects.

Should you volunteer for a month?

Find an independent organization in your field of interest. With a month at your disposal to commit to a volunteer project, you have time to self-arrange the tourism side of travel and can save a lot of money by skipping the middleman.

Or go through a middleman for a hassle-free, all details handled volunteer trip—just be sure that the middleman is not a catch-all operator allowing volunteers of any skill or interest.

This is the catch, because these types of operators are hard to find. You want to find operators with a long-term investment in the communities where they work, that way you can be sure your service is both wanted and needed, not simply a project intended to make volunteers feel good. Start with this comprehensive list of questions to ask your volunteer organization when vetting potentials.

How to volunteer for the summer.

Independently arrange your volunteer placement. Placement fees charged by middlemen can stack up for a volunteer, but also take a lot of potential money and autonomy away from those on-the-ground who manage volunteers.

Long-term volunteers and interns have time to figure out the specific placement details through research or while on the ground. With time on your hands, you may find independent grassroots organizations can offer plenty of assistance, and you don’t need placement organizations at all.

I highly recommend that you skip the multinational companies—the fees you save by not using a middleman or a massive voluntourism company are better spent locally when you are on the ground.

How to volunteer for a year.

Use the term “internship” when searching for organizations to fit your needs. There are many wonderful companies offering low-cost or free placement help for volunteers with a long-term time commitment to give to important projects. I highly recommend long-term volunteering: it’s the best way to integrate, understand, and make a difference.

We have an entire section of the site dedicated to listing volunteering internships, most of which start at three- to six-months or longer of a time commitment—it varies by project, so simply use the filters in the sidebar to find the right project for your internship.

Additional Considerations

It’s not just about the amount of time you have on your hands when you’re figuring out how long you should volunteer for, but also the skills you bring to the projects and how you can support the development and conservation work.

Some areas of volunteering really do lend themselves to short-term volunteers—there are trash collection projects in Southeast Asia that do wonders and every hand helps—while others contain sensitive elements that are best handled either by skilled or long-term volunteers.

Just because a volunteer organization will let you join a project does not mean that you should.

There are few hard and fast rules about how long you must spend volunteering to consider your time ethical and well-spent. The world is a big place and issues in one part of the world appear very different in others. That said, here are a few rules of thumbs that you can use to determine the type of volunteering that might be a good fit for your upcoming travels.

Working with children

By and large, you should not work on volunteer projects allowing volunteers to work with children for less than a one-month time commitment, nor on projects that do not require a background check. Turnover in orphanages, after-school programs, and more can have a negative effect on children and it’s best to reserve a month of your life to ensure you can dedicate the time needed to help more than harm.

This includes volunteer positions where you are teaching English to children. While there are some exceptions—projects that have volunteers work with teachers instead of directly with the children—this is a good rule of thumb.

Environmental conservation

Good news, there are no restrictions here and the wide range of conservation projects available—tree planting, picking up trash, educational initiatives, etc—mean that there are both short- and long-term options on nearly every continent.

Projects include such things as trail marking in South America to reef monitoring off the coast of Madagascar. With such a range, it’s best that you identify your specific interest and then see how long is normal for volunteers hoping to make a positive impact.

Animal and wildlife conservation

Like environmental conservation, there is a range of opportunity here and this is an area where volunteers with shorter time-frames can feel good about dropping in and helping in their short amount of time (sometimes just a day or weekend affair).

The shorter projects tend to work with animal welfare—dog rescue centers and such—while those projects requiring long-term volunteers (a month or more) often work with endangered or vulnerable animals.

Construction projects

There are a lot of time commitments, but it’s usually only the multi-national companies that allow volunteers to spend days or a mere week building something like a school. If you are using independent volunteer companies, they will want you there for a month, at least, to see a project through to completion.

By requiring that volunteers stay longer, organizations can minimize their losses in training time. If you have experience in construction work, however, there are many projects that may use your skills building local capacity in the week+ that you can stay.

Medical and healthcare volunteers

This massive subsector of the volunteering industry offers everything from voluntours where you spend a day or week and then see local sights. These are not inherently wrong. Trips like that usually command high fees because the medical volunteer’s fees pays for the medicines and supplies that they will distribute to rural communities.

Specializations within the medical fields—eye doctors, surgeons, etc—are often highly sought in some areas, and many projects bring in foreign doctors to not only treat the community, but to pass on skills. As such, many of these projects ask that doctors stay at minimum two weeks so that there is strong knowledge sharing between the volunteer and local healthcare workers.

Your Next Steps:

Now that you have a good idea of the type of projects that are a good fit for your trip, and the type of skills you can offer to international communities, you have a few possible next steps.

• Search our social enterprise database for organizations—restaurants, tour companies, massage parlors, hotels, and more—that need your business as you travel the world!
• Use our resource page to begin finding and selecting projects: How to Get Started With Independent Volunteering.
• Search our database of hand-vetted independent volunteering projects discovered by our GV Ambassadors.
• Check out our Responsible Travel Guides, which are thorough resources offering advice on responsible travel for some of the most popular countries in the world. You’ll find advice on the best social enterprises, ethical considerations specific to each country, and an entire primer on responsible travel there.
• Secure the right volunteer travel insurance for your trip. Volunteer trips do not always have the same needs as regular vacations and this piece lists out your key options for volunteer travel insurance—in most cases I believe that means going with IMGlobal.