A few years ago, three travellers met by chance in a Gambian garden. Harold, Sallie and Kate were there for different, yet related, reasons – Harold was advising the government on its national tourism guidelines; Sallie was using her business skills in a volunteer placement; Kate was designing a holiday for a newspaper readers’ offer.

Discussions rapidly centred on volunteer travel, with one overwhelming and recurring theme – the extant chasm between marketing and reality in a significant number of volunteer offers. Both sides in the equation – volunteers and local communities – frequently find themselves being sold a project idea that bears little resemblance to the real situation.

We began to ask ourselves what we could do to address such potential exploitation …

… our initial idea was to ‘name and shame’ through targeted campaigning, but over the next few months, another idea took precedence: to achieve positive and long-term change, we would develop our own unique model of ethical volunteering, whereby all parties would be best-served and which would be totally open and honest in all its activities, including financial matters.

Thus – people and places –