Are there ways of volunteering abroad that are actually effective? I want to travel and volunteer for personal reasons, but it’s still important to me that the work I do is helpful (at least not harmful!). It would probably be more effective to stay home and volunteer remotely, but it would be of great personal value to me to experience the country in person.
I think there's a ton of benefit of spending time in communities that center around learning and intentional relating. You could look at the Global Ecovillage Network or www.numundo.org. I also would promote designing your own learning journey based around a project or research question and using that as an excuse to network with amazing people and hopefully offer them some useful synthesis in the end. I think designing something that centers around a research question thats important to you will lead you to pursing things enthusiastically and actually following through. It's not typical 'volunteering' but when I've done things in this spirit it's led to some amazing unexpected outcomes with rippling effects.