Community Choice Awards 2021: Volunteer Abroad

There are companies everywhere working hard to improve the world for the better. When these companies allow volunteers to join them from abroad on their mission, it's a powerful opportunity to literally change the world. It's also hard for volunteers to know which providers offer the best experience, across all the important areas that affect the volunteer experience. The following providers had top scores across all of the categories we ask reviewers to rate, making them the top volunteer abroad providers from 2020:

Volunteering abroad, unlike other categories on this site, is the one category where it's not only important to understand how the experience changed the reviewer. It's also important to understand if the program achieves its goals and the work volunteers do has a lasting positive impact, so we ask reviewers to rate the impact of their program. The following providers had the top scores in the Impact category:

While volunteering abroad is an opportunity for volunteers to experience freedom and independence they might never have before, it's also critically important that the volunteer abroad program they choose is available for any support they do need. We ask alumni to consider how much support the volunteer abroad program staff provide; the following providers had the top scores in the Support category:

We obviously think that volunteering abroad should be a fun experience -- in fact, we ask every reviewer to tell us how much fun they had overseas, for almost every program they rate on our site. For volunteer abroad programs, we ask alumni to share what they rate the social scene for their volunteer abroad program. The following providers had the top scores in the Fun category:

Value is a tricky thing to score; everyone has a different idea of what they value and how much something is worth. Generally speaking, our goal in asking volunteers to rate the value of a volunteer program is for them to tell us whether they think the cost of their program was worth the money they paid. The following providers had top scores in the Value category:

Safety is one of the most important factors we ask reviewers to rate; almost every program on Go Overseas (even those that aren't in the volunteer abroad category) is rated on safety. In particular, we want to know how safe volunteers felt while volunteering and living in the local community. The following providers had the top scores in the Safety category: