Volunteering Overseas: A Life after Redundancy

Being made redundant can close many doors or open new ones, with this being likely to depend largely on your individual circumstances, such as personal, financial and familial responsibilities, as well as professional ones, like whether you will need to retrain for a whole new career or start working in a new aspect of your old one, such as though consultancy or training others. If responsibilities and redundancy package mean that you don’t need to start earning again immediately, there is also another option for opening doors wider than just straight into another workplace, and that is volunteering overseas:

Redundancy, particularly after many years of hard work and loyalty within one company, can be extremely distressing as well as a real drain on confidence and self-esteem. Many newly redundant professionals feel a real sense of being de-valued and rejection, so signing up to a volunteer project, at home or overseas can help to redress that balance and restore a sense of having something to offer, particularly if you get involved with a project that uses your experience and skills. Knowing that you have made a significant contribution to the successful completion of the project can be a real boost to feelings of self-worth.

Redundancy can also be very isolating. If you have previously been at the centre of a real hub of activity or within a working “community”, suddenly finding yourself outside of that circle can really add to the sense of being rejected or cut off, sometimes to the extent of losing the willingness or ability to interact with the outside world, at least for a time. Volunteering for a community-based project can really be an answer to the majority of these issues – it gets you out and about, contributing and interacting with others, but as well as this, it helps you to move on and shows that you have greater things to offer beyond your old ‘working’ self.

Whilst being made redundant can be extremely devastating, there is no doubt that at times it is hard to keep this in a certain perspective. If it is manageable, then volunteering overseas can also re-establish a real sense of perspective to the situation as volunteer projects, particularly overseas, can include clean-ups and reinstatement of basic living requirement after acts of natural devastation or environmental disaster. Contributing your skills in these circumstances can indeed have a grounding effect, restoring both the area and your ability to be able to identify the positive aspects of your newly redundant status.

Lastly, and similarly to above, volunteering in situations where local communities do nothing but exist and work hard to improve their own situations (and those of their neighbours) can be a real lesson in humility which is hard to spot in our everyday professional lives. Sometimes we need to be in a situation where we see the most affected having the best attitudes to what now needs to be done, in order to be able to apply this to our own lives. In this way, the experience of being a volunteer overseas can mean that you bring far more back with you than the memories.