Aid Worker Voices / More on the blog that turned into a book

More on the blog that turned into a book

Posted on: September 23, 2016 | By: Tom Arcaro | Filed under: Aid Worker Voices book

Below is a press release from Elon University about Aid Worker Voices.
Here is the revised press release that came out today that includes comments from Becca Price, Elon ’01, who helped in many phases of the project.

Sociologist Tom Arcaro tells the story of the global aid workers using their own voices

The book, published by Carpe Viem Press, is now available

Sept. 23, 2016 — Using expansive insights from more than 1,000 development aid workers around the world, Tom Arcaro tells the stories of their challenges, triumphs and motivations in “Aid Worker Voices.”

This latest book by Aracaro, a renowned professor of sociology at Elon University, is now available on Amazon as a paperback or Kindle edition through Carpe Viem Press. The book is the product of years of work by Arcaro including an in-depth survey of a broad swath of aid workers. Arcaro has distilled the results of that comprehensive survey to produce “Aid Worker Voices, a nearly 300-page book that appeals to a wide range of readers.

“A must-read for whoever is interested in understanding aid workers or wants to become one, as well as for anyone who took part to the “Aid Worker Voices” survey whose results are presented in this book,” says one reviewer on Amazon. “This book does not give solutions to “fix” the aid systems, but paints a quite accurate picture of what aid workers experience in their day-to-day, which is very far from Hollywood representations of it.”

“Aid Worker Voices” is the intersection of multiple interests — Arcaro’s role as director of Project Pericles at Elon, a program helps instill students with a sense of social responsibility and civic concern, and his growing interest in global development aid and those that work in the field. “Over the years, I’ve gotten more and more immersed in development aid material and literature, and reading more and more about development aid workers,” Arcaro said.

Arcaro said he was overwhelmed by the volume of respondents to the survey, which was made available online for about eight months, as well as the depth of the responses that aid workers provided. “The people that responded are the real deal — these are the aid workers with a lot of experience,” Arcaro said. “I was just amazed at the thoughtfulness that some people put into their answers.”

Many took the time to write a “short essay” in response to some survey questions, with Arcaro saying he heard from some that “it was cathartic to do the survey because no one had ever asked them about these things before.”Among the areas explored are the motivations workers as they entered the field, their thoughts on bureaucracies and aid organizations, how faith enters into their work, the impact of their gender on the work they do and how they are received, and issues surrounding race and identity.

Arcaro also dives into the challenges aid workers might face explaining the work they do to those that aren’t involved in the field and why those who have changed careers left this line of work. Arcaro also used the insights he gained from the survey to look at the future of the development aid sector. “It was just fun and frankly an honor to read all of what they had to write,” Arcaro said of the survey responses. “It was humbling that so many took the time to respond so thoughtfully.”

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Tom Arcaro

Tom Arcaro is a professor of sociology at Elon University. He has been researching and studying the humanitarian aid and development ecosystem for nearly two decades and in 2016 published 'Aid Worker Voices'. He recently published his second and third books related to the humanitarians sector with 'Confronting Toxic Othering' published in 2021 and 'Dispatches from the Margins of the Humanitarian Sector' in 2022. A revised second edition of 'Confronting Toxic Othering' is now available from Kendall Hunt Publishers