Market Incentives and International Volunteers: The Development and Evaluation of Fair Trade Learning

As a component of university international education programming, international volunteerism and global community engagement by university students and faculty are on the rise. While the benefits to student learning related to this kind of programming have been well researched, community impact is rarely assessed. This article considers the community impact of these practices. The evaluation process piloted here grew from a civil society articulation of Fair Trade Learning (FTL), which aspires to ensure community concerns are at the center of community-engaged international education efforts. We begin by clarifying the development of this FTL ideal while documenting the need for it within the international education and international volunteerism sectors. We then situate FTL within the relevant service-learning, international volunteerism, tourism, and international development literature before demonstrating how research on domestic university-community partnerships (Stoecker & Tryon, 2009) led us to develop a mixed methods evaluation of those partnerships in four different locations around the world. We close by discussing the results and sharing implications for FTL, volunteerism, and global university-community engagement.