All about Meaningful Volunteer

Meaningful Volunteer was founded in 2008 by Malcolm Trevena of Auckland, New Zealand. Malcolm graduated from the University of Canterbury in 1995 before embarking on a successful ten year successful career in information technology.

Malcolm became disillusioned with the corporate world, resigned from his job and began a life of activism.

Malcolm volunteered as a teacher both in the Philippines for seven months and on the Buduburum Refugee Camp in Ghana for two months. He spent six months in Uganda working together with various women groups to form GrassRootsUganda.com – an NGO (Non Governmental Organization) dedicated to the empowerment of impoverished African women.

Like the corporate world, Malcolm soon became disillusioned with volunteerism. While he had the time of his life in the Philippines as a teacher, he began to question whether he was truly having a meaningful impact. All he did in the Philippines was replacing a teacher in the classroom. Was this really helping?

This feeling began to grow at the Buduburum Refugee Camp where he saw well meaning volunteers engaged in meaningless activities. A young American lady who was training to be a teacher merely observed classes and did the odd bit of marking. Malcolm felt we could surely do better than this.

Things came to a head when Malcolm visited an isolated village in Uganda with a local NGO. He spent a day teaching a group of lovely old ladies their A B Cs. A day teaching was a waste of everybody’s time. He may as well have not been there.

It was during this time that Malcolm developed his ideas about what meaningful volunteerism actually was. He came up with his Meaningful Test and finally did something meaningful with his time when he founded GrassRootsUganda.com.

Malcolm wanted to share his vision about how a volunteer can have a meaningful impact on their community and not just be “volunteer tourists”.

He formed Meaningful Volunteer to give volunteers that chance.