By Townhall Chicago News Staff
Systems-led Leadership, LLC is a consultancy founded by Daniela Papi-Thornton that works with educators and organizations on systems-thinking approaches to social impact. Papi-Thornton, the firm’s founder and a lecturer at the University of Colorado Boulder, says volunteer travel programs can cause real harm when they are built as short-term, pay-to-play experiences rather than long-term partnerships with communities.
Papi-Thornton spent six years in Cambodia running a hybrid educational social enterprise, an experience that shaped her view of the risks that come with well-intentioned outsiders arriving to help. She later served as deputy director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford’s Saïd Business School, where she also taught MBA courses, and holds an MBA from Saïd Business School as a Skoll Scholarship recipient. She has since developed the Impact Gaps Canvas, now used at accelerator programs worldwide, and Map the System, a global competition run at more than 50 institutions annually. The educator network she launched in 2013 has grown into Systems. Change. Educators. Unite. (SCEU), a community of more than 400 educators globally.
Papi-Thornton said paid volunteer trips create financial incentives that can lead to exploitation. “It can’t be just pay to play,” she says. “The more money people are willing to pay, there will be corrupt means of meeting that money.”
She pointed to specific practices she considers harmful. “The negative pieces… when we’re using children as tourist attractions, when we’re giving people this ‘get out of jail free card’ where they think they can just go on a trip and not change their life,” she says.
Papi-Thornton said ethical design and attention to power dynamics separate meaningful volunteer work from programs that function mainly as “a new coat of paint” for travelers’ own self-image.
