Career advice » Preparation and training »
Internships in NGOs and national volunteering
- Page updated onMarch 15, 2025
Are you eager to get involved in social action and the third sector and interested in working in cooperation in the future? Well, one of the best ways to start is by volunteering locally, in the city where you live. If you are already preparing and advancing in your basic academic training, you also have the possibility of doing an internship in NGOs.
Both paths, perfectly complementary to each other, are often the first contact of future professionals with the third sector and NGOs, which highly value the social sensitivity and motivation to be active in the community, as well as the competencies and skills that are learned with it. In addition, they often help to alleviate the lack of professional experience when looking for a first job.
Table of contents:
Volunteering: solidarity and learning locally
Volunteering not only brings benefits to society but also to yourself. Volunteering in social action and activism and getting involved in youth and student associations can help you develop skills and competencies that, in the future, can be key in a job in international cooperation.
In local volunteering you can learn a lot about teamwork, planning activities, problem solving, interpersonal communication with people from different backgrounds and cultures, preparing reports, fundraising and grant justification, time management, coordinating teams of less experienced people, or just getting to know from the inside how an NGO works and even participate in its board of directors and governing bodies.
The best part? That all this can be developed, in most cases, locally, without leaving your city. Here there are also people without sufficient social protection from the system, who are in a vulnerable situation, who have been marginalized by the market, or who suffer discrimination of any kind.
Most countries have an enormous offer of volunteering in many different areas, such as leisure and free time (as camp monitors, youth groups or camps), education (support in language learning for migrants, or educational reinforcement for students), fair trade (stores and campaigns) or health (accompaniment of sick or elderly people or actions to promote health). In addition, hundreds of associations and social movements offer the possibility of being actively involved on a voluntary basis in all aspects of their management, administration and dynamization.
Volunteering and professional internships in humanitarian NGOs
The opportunity to get to know international organizations and for them to get to know you
Some international NGOs (and UN agencies) offer valuable opportunities for (usually young) people to undertake internships at their headquarters and offices. In most cases, these internships do not include the opportunity to travel to low- or middle-income countries or countries in humanitarian crises (usually for good reasons).
These internships are usually associated with academic institutions or with the study of certain postgraduate programs, such as masters in global health or international cooperation. They are also sometimes open to interested recent graduates who spontaneously contact the organization, a department or one of the people working there to proactively propose an unpaid internship.
Internships in NGOs can provide a valuable unpaid professional experience. This experience can also be useful to get to know yourself better and see if your expectations fit with the day-to-day reality of the job, make yourself known in the sector and meet experienced professionals who can inspire you and even serve as a source of information and guidance on how to continue your career. There are many cases in which, after an internship, that person ends up working in the organization.
When contacting the organization, demonstrate proactivity and autonomy
When considering an internship in NGOs, it is highly recommended not just to send a resume and a generic email explaining your motivation. If there is no existing internship program, it may be difficult for the organization to "make room" for someone to join who, if they have little autonomy, may have a workload that they do not have the capacity to monitor and supervise. If there is an existing program, there may be a lot of competition for a few positions.
In fact, it is highly recommended that, when contacting an organization to suggest an internship, you demonstrate a good knowledge of the organization and the priority areas of its work, and even propose actions to be carried out that may be of interest.
Many organizations would be willing to open their doors for an internship or unpaid collaboration to someone who would offer to prepare training and learning materials, help assess how the latest global recommendations on a topic are being or could be applied in international projects, or analyze existing information from past or ongoing projects to help draw lessons learned of what works and what doesn't work, for example. Many of these tasks can even be performed remotely and can fill needs that the organization's staff never has time for.
Even in cases where what is proposed is not exactly what the organization needs, it is easier for them to make a collaboration offer to someone who demonstrates autonomy, creativity, proactivity and technical knowledge, than to someone who just sends a resume.
English 
Español