Anny guided us through a narrow alleyway in old Delhi, drawing our attention to tiles decorated with religious symbols affixed to a clean yet otherwise nondescript wall.

“Do you know why they put these tiles here?” she asked our group.

Prior to this, Anny’s script departed from that of your typical guide. She threaded the story of street children in India into her tour — how they end up on the street, their survival tactics, the ways they spend the money they make and steal, and their dreams.

Not the stuff of your average light-hearted city walking tour. The story she told was hers, delivered through the lens of her firsthand experience of 18 years. She’d been orphaned at five years old and lived for the last ten years in a shelter run by Salaam Baalak Trust, a local organization providing support, education and training to children who once lived on the street.

“To discourage public urination on the wall,” Anny said, returning to her unsolved riddle. Recognition of a special brand of local wit passed over our group.

During a trip (sponsored) to India and Nepal with G Adventures and Planeterra Foundation, Anny served as one example of the once marginalized now gaining a foothold. We would also meet human trafficking survivors in Kathmandu, survivors of acid attacks in Agra, and stereotype-breaking women driving taxis in Delhi who are all forging their own way, using tourism and the access and opportunities it can provide as a way to break through discrimination, societal norms and ceilings.

We emerged from each travel encounter engaged, our view widened by a humanizing and respectful exchange. It occurred to us that we were also taking part in something much greater: an emerging model of travel-powered social activism where all participants play a role in feeding an undercurrent of social change.

What follows are a few more stories, how it all works, and — if this sounds engaging — what you should look for as a traveler.

Travel and Social Activism: Inclusion of the Marginalized

How did Anny, an orphan living in an NGO homeless shelter, become our Delhi city guide? And how can everyone be positively impacted by this transformation?

Salaam Baalak Trust, in conjunction with project partners Planeterra Foundation and G Adventures, offers the disadvantaged youth it shelters the opportunity to take English language courses and training in guiding and tourism. The goal: to build confidence, practical skills and experience in preparation for when they must leave the shelters at 18 years old and seek employment to support themselves.

G Adventures sends most of its travelers whose trips include Delhi on a city walk as part of their tour, resulting in tour fee contributions from 4,000 travelers each year. This gives guides like Anny, one of nine who’ve been trained so far, an opportunity to hone their skills through real world experience. The revenues from city walks also help to provide a sustainable source of funding, currently around 5% of the total budget, to support Salaam Baalak Trust’s programs.

That the majority of Salaam Baalak Trust guides are currently female also helps break gender stereotypes. Given the forces against women in Delhi, the impact of this cannot be overstated.

As we explore the depth of our curiosity about the world, we are often called to challenge and question the way things are and why.

In the beginning, while leading their tours, many of the young female guides had been hassled and ridiculed by male taxi and rickshaw drivers. However, after seeing them with foreign visitors day after day, the drivers developed a respect for the young women. With so few opportunities for poor and marginalized young women, it’s crucial for society to see them in public spaces and in dignified positions to help reinforce their strength and value.

The city walk is constructed with respect and curiosity and embraces a “there are no bad questions” mindset. Travelers see multiple benefits: a unique experience, deeper knowledge of Delhi, and social context for what they’ll witness throughout India – along with the knowledge that proceeds from their tour fees will in some small way fund much needed social disruption.

Travel and Social Activism: A Personal Story Supplements the Sights

Days later, after visiting the Taj Mahal, a symbol of eternal love, our group piled into tiny little Sheroes Hangout Café – home to survivors of acid attacks — in the city of Agra. A group of women ranging in ages wore “My Beauty is My Smile” t-shirts, greeted us as we entered and shook our hands.

At first, I found it awkward being so happily greeted by a group of women disfigured by acid attacks. This discomfort, I would discover, was mine alone.

As we organized ourselves to leave, however, our primary lesson snapped into view.

The women took selfies with members of our group, intending to upload them to their Instagram accounts. They posed for our cameras. They were excited, smiling straight into our camera lenses. While so many of us were hesitant out of a sense of respect to photograph them when we first entered, we would later understand that they wanted to be seen as much as anyone else. They didn’t want to be hidden. They did not want to hide. Instead, they hoped to exhibit their newfound strength, pride and beauty.

Not only as survivors, but as women.

Exposing Societal Issues, Funding Activism

Sheroes Hangout Café enables the slow but sure exposure of a societal dysfunction. Members of Sheroes (She + Heroes, get it?) — acid attack survivors once ostracized from society who now work dignified jobs — show themselves proudly in public. They support their families. They’ve also gained respect in the community for it all.

Their work and mission doesn’t end there, however.

They’re also out on the streets across the nation leading protests, helping to change laws, slowly wrenching societal norms toward decency — so that acid attacks may no longer be a thing in Indian society. The #StopAcidAttacks campaign chips away at the prejudices and societal structures which had metastisized around them.

While the experience offers travelers a lens or a magnifying glass on the community being visited – in this case the city of Agra and India itself — it can also offer a mirror, since the deeper issues at work often find resonance back home. While acid attacks are thankfully not a societal phenomenon in our home country, the United States, misogyny and violence towards women both are.

Social and Economic Opportunity As a Statement

“I love to drive. I know how empowering it can be,” Meenu Vadera, Executive Director of Azad Foundation and pioneer of Women on Wheels, said.

The empowerment she refers to — it’s economic, social, and personal.

From a traveler perspective, Women on Wheels is a social enterprise taxi service in Delhi and other major cities like Jaipur and Kolkata in India. Their drivers are all female. Many are single mothers, survivors of domestic abuse living in slums or resettlement communities, or both. Azad Foundation, the local NGO behind Women on Wheels, works with the social enterprise Sakha Consulting to provide jobs and women’s rights training to disadvantaged women so they can become professional drivers.

In India, and Delhi especially, a focus on gender opportunity is noteworthy. For example, when we arrived at the airport in Delhi all of the drivers waiting to collect passengers and holding signs were men – except Reena, the young woman scheduled to pick us up.

This airport transfer is now included in all G Adventures tours which depart from Delhi. It provides safe and reassuring transport, particularly for solo female travelers taking their first trip to India.

And to the traveler, the whole experience feels like something is being set right.

The Scale of Change

As I get my hands dirty folding momos (Nepalese dumplings), I learn the story of human trafficking – not only in Nepal where it has increased since the 2015 earthquake, but also around the world. The statistics about human trafficking fast become personal and humanized when a survivor stands next to me and helps me fumble my way through tucking momo dough so my dumplings maintain their structural integrity in boiling water.

At Sasane, a local organization in Kathmandu, Nepal “run by survivors for survivors” of human trafficking, women share their personal journey of what it means to go from the terror of being trafficked to the hope of holding dreams of professional and personal success.

One of the ways Sasane does this is by training survivors with high school degrees to be paralegals. Having experienced something similar themselves, they then use their background and skills to help trafficking victims make reports at local police stations, all in an effort to bring traffickers to justice. Until now, 270 certified paralegals have advised over 9,000 people. Most importantly, police now take them seriously and help with investigations.

For those survivors who are not high school graduates, Sasane partnered with Planeterra Foundation to create the Sisterhood of Survivors program to provide training in hospitality, English and guiding. Participants are able to apply what they’ve learned, including the practical experience of giving momo cooking classes to G Adventures passengers visiting Kathmandu. Proceeds from the classes also help fund Sasane’s ongoing operations, including their programs to combat human trafficking.

This also teaches participants to value themselves and consider their backstory – the fabric of the challenges they’ve encountered and overcome – as a possible source of strength. The consistent and uplifting lesson to these young women: your challenges will always be a part of you, but how can you use them as a force for good?

Traveler Benefit: Participation in the Solution

Social activism-charged tourism enables awareness and understanding of the world and its complexities in context. It goes beyond the single story. Sure, travelers want to see the sights, but increasingly they also crave illumination of the deeper and underlying nature of the places they visit. They want to see the Taj Mahal or the Kathmandu Valley, but they also wish to pair their visits to conventional landmarks with unexpected experiences that move or change them.

This desire motivates tour companies to partner with local organizations to offer layered experiences which expose societal challenges and enable travelers to participate in the solution. Social purpose is built-in, integrated into itineraries and stitched into the travel supply chain through tours, accommodation, eating, transport, or shopping.

As travelers, we can vote with our feet, make purchasing decisions in line with our values and watch our travel dollars not only deliver meaning to us, but meaning and value to the organizations and individuals we meet. We can witness affected organizations and communities reap long-lasting socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental benefits.

It’s important to note that the examples we cite here illustrate a specific kind of travel experience. They are not volunteer experiences which often present conflicting savior dynamics, nor are they one-off corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. What sets these examples apart is their genesis inside existing hard-working community organizations who seek, not by way of intermediaries or outside organizations, to dislodge deep, systemic societal injustices.

The Future of Travel As Social Activism

As we explore the depth of our curiosity about the world and the places we visit, we find paths of discovery, of community engagement, and of transcendence through experience. And we are often called to challenge and question the way things are and why.

Social activism in our travels – interacting with organizations helping to shift the norms of societies – can be instrumental to this unfolding. If we know what type of experiences and organizations to look for as travelers, we can intersect transforming ourselves with our tiny yet important role in helping to transform the communities we interact with.

We may not be able to boil the ocean of social injustice the world knows by simply traveling, but we can certainly apply some heat based on the travel choices we make.

The post Can Travel Be an Act of Social Activism? appeared first on Uncornered Market.

When we told friends last month that we would visit social enterprises in Peru which intersected with the travel industry, we could read in their reactions both affirmation and confusion.

“Social enterprise…hmmm, that sounds cool. But what does that really mean? And what does it have to do with travel?”

Similarly, I recently suggested to clients in Kyrgyzstan that the regional DMO (Destination Management Organization) operating models Audrey and I helped them set up — tourist office-agencies which developed the local tourism sector while earning money from its local tours and services to sustain operations — resembled a social enterprise. We considered this a strength.

“Social enterprise…what’s that?” They asked. “And how do we do it?”

Before we answer those questions, a step back as to why this matters – to those of us who travel, to the local communities we visit, and to the world as a whole.

Note: This article was originally published June 12, 2018 and updated on April 3, 2019.

Overtourism vs. Community-Based Tourism: The Opportunity Landscape

We’ve all seen headlines about 1.2+ billion tourists and the potential environmental, cultural and economic havoc overtourism can wreak on the places we visit. Not to mention, the negative impact on the destination and experiences that brought tourism there in the first place.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Tourism done well and right can also enhance local communities so that they are at once attractions and also better places for local people to live. This is the sustainable tourism holy grail: travelers traveling with social impact in mind, making deliberate travel decisions aligned with their values, having more meaningful travel experiences, and engaging with businesses and organizations that care.

A tall order, isn’t it? Among the mechanisms travelers have to achieve this, social enterprise.

We’ve always minded the social impact of travel throughout our work, travels and writing. However, it was our recent “G for Good” tour-meets-study trip in Peru with G Adventures which further catalyzed our thinking. Our experiences in Peru exposed the supply chain and demonstrated in detail exactly how purchasing travel services (e.g., tours, accommodation, restaurants, transportation, souvenirs, etc.) through social enterprises can deliver benefits to travelers and communities at once.

It also expanded and deepened our sense of what those benefits are.

What are Social Enterprises? A Working Definition

Though the concept has been around for ages, the actual term “social enterprise” originated in the U.K. in the 1970s. Initially, it meant a financially viable common ownership organization operating in an environmentally responsible way, delivering something referred to as “social wealth.”

“What is that in ordinary speak?” you ask.

Fast-forward to today, using layman’s terms. A social enterprise is roughly a market-driven organization which also fulfills a social or environmental mission. We could debate and parse words, but the two concepts required to pass the social enterprise sniff test: the organization makes money, then invests a significant portion or all of its proceeds/profits back into community projects.

Social enterprises are not entirely dependent on grants or donations (this is how they differ from NGOs). Instead, they are financially sustainable through the sale of their products and services.

It's also true that social enterprises and their products often appeal to consumers on an altruistic level. That link may even inform the business model and messaging. Regardless, the essence of the social enterprise remains the same: earn money and invest the lion’s share to serve the community.

Let’s talk features and some common examples you might find in your travels.

5 Key Features of Social Enterprises in Travel: What Makes Them Unique?

1. Organic and Driven by Community Strengths

A social enterprise may find motivation and market access through an international partner, but its essence is organic. Its products and experiences typically draw on the existing cultural raw materials and strengths of the local community.

If you peel back the layers of how a social enterprise came to be, you might find a community which asked itself, “What do we need to accomplish our goals? And what cultural assets, strengths, and elements of identity can we bring to bear?”

Sure, sometimes outside advice or financing is needed to kick-start the project and help achieve those goals, but the ongoing physical and mental energy emanates from within the community.

Adrienne Lee, Director of Development at Planeterra Foundation, explained: “We'll work with our community partners and ground partners to develop a tourism plan that encompasses and drives their vision and mission-driven work (help brainstorm what we've done in other countries, look at where we might be able to replicate models, collaborate on ideas) and develop this budget with them.

We provide our funding for the length of the program to get it off the ground. Once it's “market-ready” and included into tourism product (or G Adventures itineraries), and our budget for the tourism enterprise is completed, we usually step away at this point.”

2. Market-Driven and Viable

In Kyrgyzstan, we worked with four regional DMOs, focusing first on inventorying capacity, then branding and identity, and finally on implementing a rapid sustainable product development process.

The aim: to create market-ready tour products that highlighted the unique strengths and characteristics of each destination while also tapping into the leading travel market trends of food, culture and light adventure. These new local experiences rose to meet traveler demand to do and engage more in each destination, but in a way that emphasized community, identity and dignity. Throughout the process, the DMOs behaved as social enterprises.

After just one tourism season, average stays in each of the destinations – Karakol, Osh, South Shore of Lake Issyk-Kul, and Jyrgalan – is on a steep upswing. Each destination now has a brand identity in line with products and traveler experience. Moreover, community members now say things like, “We think about ourselves differently…we never thought about ourselves or our abilities in this way.”

3. Surfaces the Human Supply Chain

A travel experience is created and delivered differently from an object like an iPhone or a purse. Sure, people might have helped make those things. But, when I hold those products, I rarely experience direct human contact.

Not so in travel. Travel is high touch, high context. When I travel, people are not only involved throughout the process, they are essential.

This is especially true with experiences delivered under social enterprise. Impacted communities aren’t just a backdrop. Their human engagement components are the main event. They serve as critical, differentiating features of the travel experience. The idea: you are immersed in the community or environment, and your purchase and engagement make a direct, positive impact on the people you’ve met.

In this way, tourism truly is the people’s business.

Our first travel encounter with a social enterprise was in Hanoi, Vietnam ten years ago. The Hoa Sua School network of restaurants, bakeries and cafes throughout the city provided hospitality training and practical work experience to disadvantaged youth. Not only were food quality and service level high, but we also knew that our money (and our time) spent at the restaurants contributed to the futures of the young people working there.

4. Their Ecosystems Spawn Knock-On Businesses and Benefits

Because social enterprises are community-centric, they often spur development of other micro-enterprises to fill gaps and meet new supply needs. For example, at Parwa Community Restaurant in the Sacred Valley — a three-year initiative co-financed by the Multilateral Investment Fund of the Inter-American development bank and G Adventures, implemented by Planeterra — one local entrepreneur set up a business to harvest quail eggs essential to one of the lunch courses on the menu. Another community member entrepreneur now offers trekking snacks made from local, natural ingredients to sell to travelers headed for the Inca Trail.

When a social enterprise is successful, the community may draw other needed attention, too. At the Ccaccaccollo Women’s Weaving Cooperative, another Planeterra Foundation project, one woman told the story of how the cooperative’s success encouraged the local government to begin improving local roads. Absent the community’s social enterprise success, she believes the government would have continued to ignore their requests for infrastructure assistance.

5. Transcends the Transaction

Especially for external partners creating or making an investment in social enterprise, it’s about having skin in the game. And we’re not just talking an economic or financial stake, but an emotional one.

Unlike some Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives, social enterprise is not about donating a bunch of money to salve one’s conscience, or throwing a couple of paragraphs in the annual report to tick off the “we’re doing something good” corporate checkbox. Don't get us wrong — those types of donations and support are also essential. But building or investing in a social enterprise is different.

Social enterprise creation requires active engagement, depth of involvement and connection. It demands the expenditure of personal capital, emotional capital, and time. When done well and thoughtfully, the result is the creation of something that matters to an entire community of people beyond just those directly employed.

To think of it another way, social enterprise investment resembles venture capital where not only is money invested, but time is spent mentoring, guiding and building relationships. This approach typically offers better stewardship and oversight of one’s investment, but it first requires a greater level of care and commitment.

As a traveler or a consumer, take a step back from any transaction or interaction with a social enterprise and ask yourself: Does it feel as though involved parties and partners are present and engaged? Do they really care about more than just the financial bottom line? Can you feel it?

5 Ways Social Enterprises are Good for Travelers

Social enterprise-powered travel generally fits within in the category of responsible travel or sustainable travel. Its features rich, engaging, high-context travel experiences – in part because there is no trade-off between travel pleasure and advocacy or giving back.

Instead, those are all bound together. And as a result, a traveler’s experience is enhanced or multiplied.

How?

1. Cultivates Interaction, Participation and Exchange

Social enterprise-powered travel often allows travelers to participate, to create, to interact directly with local people and communities, in a respectful, engaging way. It’s not just about observing or watching, but actively engaging in a hands-on way that chips away at barriers, assumptions and fears.

What travelers often implicitly understand in social enterprise contexts is that they and community members both – that is, each of us – has something special to offer that’s reflective of our life experience and our home culture. In this way, social enterprise travel dissolves any sense of “levels” of humanity – through interactions and experiences which simultaneously emphasize what we have in common while constructively and curiously highlighting the differences that brought us to visit the community in the first place.

When we worked with Destination Osh and Destination Karakol in Kyrgyzstan on developing food-related tours with local families and entrepreneurs, our emphasis encouraged hands-on, interactive experiences. The idea: travelers and hosts create something together while everyone shares a bit of himself in the process.

The result: bread-making courses, a family dinner where you make your own ashlan-fu (a delicious cold, vinegar-based soup), a plov (traditional rice-based dish) cooking class. The essence was interaction, not transaction. Because of that, travelers engaged in resonant experiences where their purchases all impacted locally and directly — with people the travelers actually met.

2. Builds Connection, Meaning and a Sense of Stewardship

Travel experiences delivered through social enterprise develop connection between travelers and the local community and environment. These connections also build meaning in multiple layers — in part by cultivating an immeasurable sense of care for more than oneself. Social enterprise enhances the travel experience by enabling us as travelers to develop a growing sense of ourselves, our world and our place in it.

Also, long after a social enterprise experience, its memories reinforce a relationship between the traveler, the community and the organization that brought them together.

3. Offers a Natural Platform for Transformational Travel

The binding of connection, meaning and exchange offers a natural platform for transformational travel – the idea that after my travels, I emerge changed, perhaps engaging with the world and my life back home differently upon my return.

Often times, we talk out of cliché about our travel experiences changing our lives. However, social enterprise and travel animates and motivates. Community-engaged travel experiences offered by social enterprises often plant seeds of thought and care. They provide human anchors that expand our experiential vocabulary and enable us to articulate how a travel encounter has impacted us.

Because its high-context, social enterprise often allows a traveler to more clearly articulate “This is how my travel experience changed me. This is who touched me and how I was touched.”

4. Delivers a Local Experience

Travel experiences with social enterprises are by nature community-based. So their essence, features and details are entirely local. As a traveler, you don’t need to interact with a social enterprise during your travels to ensure a local experience. However, if you engage with a social enterprise, it’s virtually guaranteed.

It’s hard to imagine an experience more local and real that the Maasai Clean Cookstoves social enterprise experience in northern Tanzania. While many tours in Tanzania visit a Maasai village on a show-and-souvenir display, this social enterprise begins by using a portion of the tour fees from G Adventures passengers headed to the Serengeti to purchase a clean cookstove for a Maasai family in a nearby village.

It then takes travelers through a stove installation process. And it's all led by local Maasai women who articulate the importance of this simple cooking device to the well-being and health of local families. Travelers enjoy a unique, intimate experience in a Maasai village, with a Maasai family.

5. Delivers a Differentiated Experience

To the point, travel experiences delivered by social enterprises are typically not of the ordinary, beaten-path variety. Because of their local, personal, community-based nature, they often feature something unusual, something different – sparking the feeling of, “I never thought about it or looked at it this way.”

This was also the case of Parque de la Papa, a new G Adventures and Planeterra Foundation partner in the Sacred Valley.

I admit to having a conflicted relationship with potatoes since they often serve as tasteless filler. Potatoes were not something I would have considered building a travel experience around. Well, no longer. After meeting a local farmer and potato enthusiast at this local organization that works with nearby agricultural communities to preserve 3,000 varieties of Peruvian potatoes, I'm convinced. No longer the lowly potato.

There were over 500 or so varieties of potatoes on display of funky shapes, colors and flavors (Yes, I ate many… and they tasted unreal!) that I had never before seen or imagined. Moreover, the discussion on potatoes and the importance of their preservation to food security of these communities helped me better understand the historical and cultural relevance of potatoes to Peru and to its people.

In other words, I'll never look at the humble potato in quite the same way again.

G Adventures pays a tour fee to Parque de la Papa for an educational, cultural and culinary experience en route to Machu Picchu. While 42 people are employed by the park, around 2,500 people in nearby communities are impacted indirectly by this social enterprise. Not to mention, the sustainable stream of income from traveler visits allows even more research to be conducted on preserving indigenous food sources and seeds.

Rare in travel that something so unassuming could have such wide-ranging impact.

5 Ways Social Enterprises Are Good for Communities You Visit

The desire to give something back to the places we visit is wholesome and ought to be encouraged. However, we need to find the appropriate outlets or channels to give effectively. The market-based, community-aware nature of social enterprises naturally lend them and their experiences to delivering direct impacts to communities and facilitating positive outcomes.

Here are just some of the impacts and benefits we've seen social enterprise-powered travel deliver to local communities.

1. Preserves Traditions

Social enterprises often aim to preserve storytelling patterns and local traditions, not only because that preservation is essential to the community and its identity, but also because those assets are valuable to delivering differentiated experiences to the travel market.

Social enterprise travel experiences typically offer culture concurrent with reality, evolved and presented in a way that feels like living history. In some instances, social enterprises rescue and resurrect valuable traditions that communities didn’t even realize they were in danger of losing.

Ten years ago, many of the local indigenous designs and traditional methods of weaving almost died out in the remote Sacred Valley village Ccaccaccolla. Although tourism in nearby Cusco and Machu Picchu had been growing, the village was far enough off the main road that they were missing out. Economically-viable opportunities for local women to produce their traditional handicrafts were evaporating quickly.

With the development of the Ccaccaccollo Women's Weaving Cooperative, G Adventures brings close to 15,000 of its tour passengers per year to visit this social enterprise. Forty-six local women now earn a living for themselves and their families by sharing their traditional weaving techniques with travelers and selling their handicrafts directly to visitors without the need of an intermediary.

Several women reporting having used their income to send their children to university, something that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. Others have invested in developing a homestay program for travelers interested in an overnight Peruvian village family experience. Mothers are once again teaching their daughters traditional Incan weaving methods and designs, hoping to sustain their passage through the generations.

2. A Dignity Based on Identity and Exchange

Social enterprises are not about charity or an unequal hierarchical relationship where one gives something to another. The key feature of social enterprise is exchange – not only of goods, services and experiences, but of a kind of cultural interchange which communicates that we all have something of value to offer one another.

This relates to the organic nature of social enterprise – where business, products and experiences link back to a sense of personal pride and stewardship for one’s community.

Key to this is the concept of identity. Engage in social enterprise-powered travel and you’ll feel and hear a sense of pride – especially when travelers from all over the world come not only to see the local nature and landscape, but to see and experience a local community — their culture, crafts, cuisine and life.

Ownership and development of this asset becomes local; and transformation ripples at the individual, group, ethnic and community levels.

This concept was first highlighted and demonstrated to us by Rabee’ Zureikat, founder of the Zikra Initiative in Jordan, an organization whose core philosophy is “riches come in many forms.”

In our experience with the women of Ghor al Mazra'a as part of a Zikra Initiative experience, they shared with us their cultural wealth — their crafts, cooking, culture, and a glimpse into their lives, their family and a primarily Afro-Jordanian community along the Dead Sea.

In other words, everyone, no matter his or her socio-economic position, has something of value to share with this world. Enterprising on the basis of this simple principle delivers a continual sense of pride, confidence and dignity.

3. Focused and Targeted

Social enterprise typically concentrates its effects on small, often marginalized communities. One social enterprise may only affect a limited number of people, but it likely does so deeply. It leads and offers examples within the wider community and to ones nearby who might wish to do something similar.

In this way, social enterprise and travel helps alter the world through micro action and effect.

4. Inclusive

Social enterprises often exhibit the core value of inclusivity – a way of living which is essential to serving the community. That inclusivity implies opportunity, especially for those who might otherwise be excluded due to their socio-economic status. It's important to note that inclusivity is provisional only on the basis that one is willing to work, to cooperate and to develop a skill. This is why job training is often a crucial component to social enterprise, as it’s along the path to expanding the pie and growing the benefit to the community and its members.

When we traveled recently to Phnom Penh, Cambodia earlier this year, we came across a network of social enterprises run by Friends-International. These businesses apply a vocational training business model which provides practical and in-demand skills and professional experience to targeted disadvantaged and marginalized youth, populations typically excluded from such opportunities.

For example, at the Friends Nails Bar, Audrey dropped-in for a manicure and pedicure. The entire organization, including the affiliated souvenir shop and restaurant, was geared to developing a professional bearing and helping its employees build confidence to continue working or launch their own businesses as they develop.

5. Economic Impact is Additive, not Extractive

If you wish to measure the full cost of your visit – ask yourself, “Besides the money I paid, what of value is left on the ground in the community after my visit?”

In other words, what's the net impact?

Essential to social enterprise is the development of an asset base or knowledge base. It’s not about travel companies running roughshod over a destination merely for profit, stripping it of its essence until it’s no longer recognizable.

The impact isn’t just money and jobs, either. It’s about an ecosystem and mindset which invests in homes, infrastructure, clean water, access to education, and more. It’s about taking stock of how the community has benefited from the enterprise, particularly outside of the direct financial exchange.

Social enterprise asks, “What is the path of the quality of life for people who live there? What is the viability”

Parwa Community Restaurant is located in a small community which is home to 65 families. Through the restaurant and organization's proceeds, community management has chosen to re-invest their profits into projects that spoke to business investment (i.e., tending an organic garden and expanding the restaurant’s capacity to host more travelers), as well as to initiatives that improved the well-being of the community and its environment. For the latter, they invested in things like water containers on community members’ houses to improve access to clean water, a new toilet block to improve sanitation, and a reforestation program to replace trees consumed for firewood.

And that’s only from 2017 profits. In previous years they invested in a computer room for local students, educational scholarships and other home improvement projects. These annual “reinvestments” have the potential to impact the community for years and generations to come.

How travelers can seek out social enterprises

At this point you might be thinking: “All this sounds well and good, but how do I go about finding social enterprises for my next trip?”

A few ideas and recommendations:

• Choose a tour operator — international or local — that partners or actively works with local social enterprises to deliver services or offer tour experiences. We’ve provided examples from the G Adventures social enterprise model in this article. You can also limit your search of their experience catalog to those tours which include a Planeterra Foundation project visit or local social enterprise component. When researching local tour operators ask about how they work with local organizations and communities to be sure that the money from your tour fees also stays in the regions instead of just in the capital city or major cities.
• Consider seeking out organizations who operate as Benefit Corporations (or, B Corporations), a type of legal entity which includes positive impact on environment, community, employees and society in its legally defined goals. B Corporations are recognized in a growing number of states in the United States (33 at the time of writing) and countries around the world. B Corporations can then use free third-party impact assessment tools to bolster their assertions of doing good or pursue independent third-party certification like the B Corp certification. You can find a listing of travel related B Corporations here.
• Conduct online research as to whether there are local social enterprise restaurants, accommodation, tours or shops in the locations where you will be traveling. In addition to mighty Google, Grassroots Volunteering's social enterprise database is a good first stop for tourism-related organizations around the world. Asking your network of family and friends, especially if they are also keen travelers with an eye to social impact and giving back, can also delivers great results and discussion.
• When you're on the ground ask around and keep your eyes open: you'll likely find that your awareness of social enterprises will surface them more quickly in your field of view. (When you learn of something new and your attention is raised to it, the phenomenon is referred to as “selective attention” or blue car syndrome). Cafes or restaurants will often display flyers or signs on their bulletin boards of local social enterprises or community organizations. Sometimes, you'll even literally stumble over the organization, as happened to us in Alice Springs, Australia, where by last-minute chance, we came across a local Aboriginal art gallery at a Salvation Army Community Center.

Conclusion: Intersection of Social Enterprise, Travel, and Healthy Communities

The great thing about the intersection of social enterprise and travel: we can all get involved – travelers, travel industry and trade, and members of host communities.

As travelers, we can achieve two-way impact, experience, and exchange. And as we optimize the impact of travel on ourselves, we can also optimize our impact on communities as we honor and respect the nuance and realities of the places we visit.

Travel companies — now, more than ever — also have the opportunity to innovate experiences which simultaneously engage travelers and serve communities just as it impacts their bottom line. To keep this in check, communities, too, must care.

It just takes a little interest, effort and time – to educate oneself, to get perspective and to continually tune our decision-making processes and choices.

But we’d argue it’s worth it. When it comes to the intersection of travel and healthy communities, we all have a stake.

The post How to Use Social Enterprises to Improve Your Travels…and Make a Difference appeared first on Uncornered Market.

“I used to see guides from other places taking travelers around the favela,” Russo, our local guide, said as he began his story at the entrance to Vidigal favela.

“What are they saying about my community if they don’t actually live here? I thought I could be a better guide. This favela is my home. I’ve spent my whole life here.”

We kicked off our recent trip to Brazil somewhat unconventionally with a visit to Vidigal, a favela in Rio de Janeiro. When people hear the term favela, their minds can run exclusively to poverty, gangs, drugs and violence. However, during our Vidigal favela tour with Planeterra Foundation and their local partner Favela Experience, we encountered a more complex story.

We met with community organizations and micro-enterprises that serve as the center point of cultural exchange and engagement for visiting travelers. Together, they create experiences based on local culture, stories, and people. The genesis is deliberately local. So too is the conclusion — with economic and social benefits intended to register first and foremost in the community.

Before we discuss our encounters with residents and leaders of the favela, let's talk about what a favela is, the ethics of favela tours for travelers, and what to look for when choosing a respectful and responsible favela tour.

What is a Favela?

Favela is Brazilian Portuguese term literally meaning “little bean” and roughly equating to “shanty town” or “slum.” It's basically an informal district whose residents have often built their homes in the outskirts of major cities — usually in areas like hillsides — where land was once considered uninhabitable by urban developers.

The first favelas in Rio de Janeiro date back to the late 19th century. After emancipation, freed slaves were driven into the hills because they couldn’t afford to live within city limits. These marginalized informal communities then grew through waves of internal migration (e.g., from other parts of Brazil to cities like Rio de Janeiro and Saõ Paulo), especially during times of economic hardship. A story familiar and universal: people fleeing difficulty at home seek a new life and economic opportunity in the city.

Over time, these once informal settlements became permanent. Shops, restaurants and other businesses emerged to serve local residents. Despite this development, favelas usually remained cut off from most or all government services. Economic opportunities in reality were limited, too, particularly when Brazil's population took off in the 1950s and everyone looked to cities for economic salvation.

Hence, the rise of drug trafficking in the favelas and the corresponding reputation of them as centers of violence and poverty. The temptation from a distance to generalize all favelas as slums — “they're all the same” — is reductive and often inaccurate.

“I want to demystify the favela,” Russo said. “Yes, there are bad things here. But there are more good things.”

When windows open onto neighborhoods once considered off limits, there's an opportunity to shift perceptions from objectified narratives of poverty and danger to the humanized ones of residents making their way.

The Ethics and Evolution of Favela Tourism

If you question the ethics of favela tourism and whether it pedals poverty as an attraction, that's good. Intent and impact of tourism in marginalized areas demands examination — whether those visits take place in the favelas of Brazil, the townships of South Africa, or the slums of major cities in India.

To this point, we asked a few locals in Vidigal what they thought about tours in their neighborhood.

The community representatives we spoke to are generally in favor of developing tourism in their favela. Their support is qualified, however. Tours and tourism must be developed from and by the community — as in local people creating experiences based on local culture and history, and delivering it all under a premise of cultural exchange. The money must stay local, too. Benefit must be accrued throughout the community.

A fair expectation, no?

Unfortunately, most favela tours to date have not unfolded in this way. The first wave of favela tours included tourists voyeuristically peering and taking photos from tour buses, never exiting the bus. “Too dangerous,” they were told by their tour organizers who'd charge them $150 or more for the privilege and quick thrill.

Favela walking tours were the next step. But the first of those were led by guides outside the community. Communities saw little benefit. Tour fees and money exited right back out to the tour companies.

Favela Tours with Social Impact: A New Model

Community-initiated favela experiences defined by and led by residents represent the next evolutionary step in favela tourism. When given the opportunity, local people are proud to show what is different and unique about their communities. That's our repeated experience, anyhow.

Planeterra Foundation partners with Favela Experience and Favela Inc, a social impact incubator in the favela, to identify local community organizations and micro-enterprises to form the core of a traveler's experience in Vidigal. Economic benefit is registered locally. So too is civic and cultural pride.

Interactions and conversations from these experiences will inform and shift your perspective and assumptions, just as they did ours. The result: a slow dissolving of the narrative of “otherness,” poverty and danger and its rightful replacement with the story of human beings.

As Russo explained: “None of my TripAdvisor reviews from travelers are about poverty. Instead, they are about the culture and smiles and life that they experienced here on my tour. It changed their view of people living in poor situations.”

When a traveler books a G Adventures tour in Brazil that includes the Planeterra Favela Experience in its itinerary, a portion of that tour fee is paid to the community partner organization as the lead supplier of the favela tour. The tour money is then divided further so that each of the community organizations and micro-enterprises involved is fairly compensated for their work in delivering the tour experience. This provides a steady and reliable source of income to the local organizations for employment and investment.

Furthermore, a portion of tour fees is invested in training, capacity building and support for new and interested community organizations and micro-enterprises. In this way, tour fees contribute to an ongoing cycle of community growth and sustainability.

Faces of the Favela: The People and Community Organizations We Met

The people we encountered were crucial to our expanded understanding of life in the favela. Together with their organizations and micro-enterprises, they form the network backbone of each Planeterra Favela Experience. For the traveler, they also communicate a kind of living history.

Russo and Vidigal Trilhas

Russo swept his hand across the only entrance and exit from Vidigal, a neighborhood with an official census population of 12,000 whose actual population runs nearly three times that. The neighborhood homescape ranges from modest finished buildings to others in states of mid-construction with unfinished floors, exposed brick and rebar.

Russo shared his story of growing up and spending his whole life in the favela — from a childhood in a simple wooden house at the top of the hill to working in a local shop for much of his early adult life. His stories wend their way through the early days of dirt roads to the paved streets coursing the favela today.

That our experience began with and was framed by Russo seemed appropriate. He was among the first local guides in Vidigal. When he initially noticed guides from outside the community escorting travelers through the favela, he decided, “If they can do it, I can do it too.”

With that idea, he founded Vidigal Trilhas, a local tour company, among the neighborhood's first.

As he saw it, the experience — for visitors and the community alike — could be improved if locals told the story of their community, rather than to have someone else tell it for them.

Along our walk, we came to football pitch and practice area for a local percussion group, Batuca Vidi. It was once the territory of a local drug gang. As Russo tells it, he and his friends worked to build the football field because they wanted a place to play. The pitch then fell into disrepair, becoming a drug hangout once again. He and others sought to restore it once more. In a turn of common interest, the gangs supported them and helped clean and rebuild.

As it turns out, many of the drug traffickers had children who needed a place to play, too.

Through community engagement, the neighborhood evolves.

So did what prospective visitors might see and learn.

Isis and Batuca Vidi

Shortly after our tour began, an energetic young woman named Isis appeared, as if out of nowhere. As we discovered from three unexpected encounters with her during our walk, her energy places her everywhere at once despite her busy schedule.

Raised by her grandmother, Isis began playing percussion instruments when she was nine. The most recent chapter of her story begins when, during one of her practice sessions on the street, five local kids approached her and asked, “Can you give us a class?”

Those five kids became her students. Despite having no instruments, they joined her by playing buckets. Interest grew and impromptu drum classes and jam sessions took place in the streets.

Isis later launched Batuca Vidi, a more formal percussion school aimed at teaching school children both music and dance. Batuca Vidi now has over 30 students, ranging from 6 to 17 years old.

With sponsorship from a Brazilian music company they've also transitioned to real drums and instruments.

Thanks to her self study of English and the social entrepreneurship training provided to her by Favela Inc, she now finds herself invited to share her organization's story around the world as she continues to grow it. When we met, she was about to set off for Grenoble, France to advise a local Muslim youth community interested in following a similar model. Later this year, her students will welcome this group from France for an exchange where they will stay and create music in the favela.

When you meet Isis you see a young woman who navigated difficulty to become a community leader. For her, music played a big role in providing opportunity. She wishes to offer a similar path to other favela youth.

Experiences like this reaffirm that positive ideas can travel the world in fascinating ways. And, we all have a little something to teach and to learn from the world we inhabit.

Paulinho and the Sitiê Eco Park (Ecological Park)

Our path continued to the Vidigal Sitiê Eco Park, on the favela's green edge. When I'd first heard of this favela experience component, my expectations were admittedly low. I was surprised, however — not only by how green and lush this urban forest park was, but also by how much had to be overcome to reclaim the space.

When we met the park steward, a gentle soul named Paulinho, it made perfect sense. He was a positive energy force and a sharer of natural medicine and life wisdom. We learned the story of how he and others removed more than five tons of trash over a three-year period following a 2006 landslide which ran through the area to the main road below, killing several people.

As Paulinho walked with us through the park, he treated us to an impromptu natural food and medicine tour featuring samples of tiny local sweet peppers, healing herbs and tasty greens — all of which demanded to someday appear in high-end restaurant salads. He explained the challenge of changing people's trash dumping behaviors. As he planted fruit trees, vegetables and herbs, he incentivized local people. The deal: don't throw trash here and you can come to the park for free fruit and vegetables. He was not only able to change behaviors regarding trash disposal, but also around respecting and valuing nature.

Paulihno shared a unique philosophy on the park and its role in the community. To him, the park was a place of positive energy. But, he said, it also drew in the negative energy of broken souls. He found that sometimes the down-and-out are attracted to the park, finding solace there. His role was to create a balance between these energies by helping those in need and perhaps even saving a few lives along the way.

“If you protect nature, nature will protect you,” he said.

Messias and Vidigal Capoeira

We met Messias, a master in capoeira — the Afro-Brazilian martial art that involves music, dance and acrobatics. In a training area fashioned on the top floor of a community municipal building, he explained capoeira and its West African slave origins. Once repressed by various forces in Brazil, capoeira is now a national symbol and is used to export Brazilian culture worldwide. An estimated nine million people around the world still practice it today.

Messias founded Vidigal Capoeira as a community organization eight years ago. 80 participants, young and old, are involved today.

“In capoeira circle, everyone is the same; there is no social status,” he explained.

His goal is for students to take this philosophy outside of the classroom and into their everyday lives.

During the favela experience, travelers have the opportunity to participate in a capoeira training session led by Massias' students.

I asked him if engaging with travelers on these tours changed his perspective on capoeira. His response reflected the nature of exchange.

“It’s good for the students. They see firsthand the power of capoeira to bring different people together regardless of country, size or social status.”

Then I asked him what surprised him most.

“They have so many questions for visitors,” he said. “They are curious to know about their countries, where they come from.”

Nilda and Vidigal Beer

After taking in the depth of our favela experience, we landed quite appropriately with a fresh Vidigal Beer on the rooftop of Novo Era co-living workspace, the home of Favela Inc and Favela Experience.

Luciano, the founder of Vidigal Beer, is a self-taught craft beer maker who began experimenting at home, combining traditional brewing techniques with some creative twists inspired from the favela. He and his wife Nilda used the initial investment from the Planeterra project to purchase some new brewing equipment, receive training to professionalize their operations, and to better market the Vidigal Beer brand.

During our visit, we sampled an on-point pilsner, perfect for the Rio summer heat. However, we've heard great things about the Vidigal Beer IPA as well. To get a sense of meaning and scale, the micro-brewery currently produces about 50 liters of beer a month, a sufficient volume for its owners to work and provide for their family.

It was a fitting way to end our visit with a sweeping view above the favela. We looked coastward to Ipanema Beach, a scene whose contrasts underscored that — in Rio de Janeiro and the wider world — we are all connected.

Favela Tour Questions You Might Ask

1) What questions should I ask about a favela tour in Brazil?

When you see a favela tour advertised, don't feel bad about asking hard questions to understand how the tour is organized, who is leading it, and where the money and benefit goes. This will allow you to evaluate whether the favela tour is ethical, respectful and incurs positive impact in the community.

• Who created and organizes the tour? Is it driven from the community itself?
• Who benefits from the tour? How? Do tour proceeds remain local?
• Will I have a local guide? How will I be able to engage with the community and its people?

2) Are Favela Tours Safe?

In general, yes. More and more, community members are aware of tourism and its potential benefits. And when you are guided by someone from the community, it further demonstrates your commitment to contributing positively to that community.

It’s important to note that you may come across drug traffickers, maybe even ones carrying machine guns — graffiti-covered ones, no less — during your experience. It’s important to observe just as we did: they are not concerned with you. Instead, there’s an occasional cat-and-mouse between them and local police who are typically kept at bay with bribes. Admittedly, this encounter placed me outside of my comfort zone and startled me for a very brief moment. However, I never felt threatened.

This is what you learn on your visit.

It’s also important to note that many drug traffickers respect and support social projects. Why? Because their families live in this place. Many of them harbor hope — hope for a future where their nieces and nephews and their own children won't need to be involved in the drug trade because economic opportunities exist in ways they did not when they were growing up in the favela.

3) Do I need a guide to visit a favela?

While it is possible to walk around these neighborhoods on your own, it’s not something we would recommend. The value and benefit of visiting a favela is not about the voyeurism of sneaking a peek, but about the interaction with local community members in a unique way that only a local guide can facilitate. This type of interaction highlights context and understanding about the history and evolution of a favela neighborhood over the decades, and in particular, how its residents approach life, engagement, and community development today.

A thoughtful favela experience like this places you in conversation with engaging community leaders. They are the pace-setters for the favela community. Most importantly, this is their home.

The post A Favela Tour in Vidigal, Rio de Janeiro: How to Do One Respectfully and Responsibly appeared first on Uncornered Market.

It was as if the men were petrified for eternity in those reliefs, struck in a terror pose as they tried to flee. While my rational mind acknowledged a scientific explanation for the geological formations around me, I slowly began to admire them in a different way, as if the stones were living, given life through story.

It’s odd I admit to consider Uluru, a 600-million year old monolith in the middle of the Australian Outback desert, as being “alive.” It’s a rock, after all. However, the more we learned about the Tjukurpa — the lattice work of laws and stories that hold together the knowledge of the creation period for the local Anangu people — the more I understood that this seemingly barren and empty land carried both life and history.

As Rachelle continued and reflected on the over 30,000 year presence of the Anangu in the area, she reminded us that the version of the story she told was intended for beginners: “To Aboriginal people we non-Aboriginals are newborn babies. We’re only just starting to learn.”

Aboriginal Australia: It’s Complicated

Aboriginal Australia. It’s inspiring and fascinating. It’s also tragic and complicated I would come to find. As this discovery unfolded for me, I struggled with how I might celebrate the beauty and wisdom of the oldest living culture in the world at nearly 50,000 years while acknowledging the discrimination and socio-economic challenges that so many of today's Aboriginal people face.

Perhaps, even with my newborn eyes, this was the beginning of my arc of understanding of Aboriginal Australia – its past, its present, and maybe a glimpse into its future.

Cafe Chloe: An Open Discussion

Aboriginal History: Not One Tribe, But Human

An Aboriginal map of Australia was laid out before us on the table at Café Chloe, a new Aboriginal community job training and traveler interaction center in the town of Tully, Queensland. The map was not only visually appealing with all its blocks of different colors, but it was also instructive. In school, I'd learned that Aboriginal people in Australia were one. Instead, Australian Aboriginals are drawn from hundreds of different cultures, approximated by the presence of over 250 distinct languages at the time the first Europeans arrived.

This was new information for me, as I suspect it was for most of the other travelers in our National Geographic Journeys group. They leaned in as Dr. Ernie Grant, a Jirrbal Rainforest People elder and Aboriginal scholar, offered something more shocking. Until 1967, Aboriginal people in Australia were legally categorized as flora and fauna. That is: plants and animals, not human. Fathom that. Aboriginal people, considered to be the oldest continuous-living culture in the world (between 40,000 and 50,000 years old), did not possess any human rights in the eyes of the modern state in which they lived until 50 years ago.

Theirs is a story of mass disruption to what was once a long-standing way of living. Long-standing perhaps being the understatement of our times.

I should add that I’m aware this history sadly echoes the history of my own country, the United States, and its treatment of Native Americans. My thoughts here also recall a piece we’d written several years ago while traveling in Chile and Argentina: Unspoken Patagonia.

Aboriginal Youth: Educating the Future on Their Past

After our discussion with Dr. Grant, a local Jirrbal high school girl read one of the creation stories to our group so as to inform and inspire an interactive Aboriginal painting session that would follow. She was nervous, her delivery halting. She had trouble reading some of the Jirrbal words. Standing just at her side, her mother leaned in to provide pronunciation guidance. Although the pockets of silence felt awkward, the experience exuded a sort of authenticity. Many Aboriginal youth are just now learning the language and stories of their ancestors.

Sonya, Dr. Grant’s daughter and project leader, explained that training students to lead painting classes and share Jirrbal stories is not just about providing job training. Sharing with travelers from around the world also empowers Aboriginal youth by helping them to take pride in who they are and to appreciate what makes their culture valuable and worthy of cultivation.

Uluru: Stories, Tradition, Code, A Way of Life

Flying from Cairns (Queensland) to Uluru, an expanse of red-tinged desert landscape sailed beneath us. Scrub trees and tiny, scattered homes drifted by. Onto this vast landscape filmstrip I overlaid the map of the diversity of Aboriginal peoples that Dr. Grant had shown us just days before. I tried to imagine the different nomadic groups who'd made this place their home for tens of thousands of years, how they'd lived from this seemingly barren land.

On the ground, we got a glimpse into how this worked. As we walked around Uluru, Rachelle told us Anangu stories that were directly related to our surroundings: we could see each part of the story in the physical markers around us. These tales were an attempt by Aboriginal ancestors to make colorful yet practical sense of their surroundings. Cave paintings taught the next generation how to find watering holes, when to hunt, how to dig for food, and which plants were poisonous. Through story and image, they passed on lessons of how to survive and to get along with one another as a community.

Theirs was an entirely different way of thinking about life, its origins and the implications for one’s day-to-day. No better, no worse than the framework I’d grown up with. Just different. And perhaps something we could learn from.

Alice Springs: A Reality Check

Our last stop in the Northern Territory Outback: Alice Springs, an unlikely urban center that rises from the middle of the desert. The situation of Aboriginal people on its city streets was a shock and contrast. Many looked itinerant; some hung around in parks and slept on benches while others walked in a substance-induced haze. You could hear yelling back and forth between groups in a nearby park. The raised voices, we’re told, is a cultural feature and doesn’t always indicate anger or violence, but it added a palpable sense of tension.

Once you understand what has happened to local Aboriginal people – that the basis and traditions of their communities was stripped from them through forced deportations, murder and discrimination — you might begin to understand how they could become lost. Displace a people, introduce a substance they aren’t biologically well equipped to metabolize (alcohol), deteriorate their social structure, and you’ve executed a perfect recipe for societal decay. Our experience served as a reality check on what life is, and has been, for many Aboriginal Australians.

During our final morning in Alice Springs, we walked through town toward one of the museums recommended to us. On the way, we saw a tiny sign, hastily positioned on the sidewalk inviting us to a non-profit Aboriginal art gallery. We made the turn and found ourselves in the middle of a Salvation Army soup kitchen and social service center. A sea of people swirled around us, many waiting in line for food. The path to the art gallery, if there was one, was not clear.

Eventually, one of the employees spotted us (i.e., disoriented tourists) and led us to an unassuming office art gallery with some impressive work. Images included representations of villages, women gathering, communal hunts, and desert animals such as snakes. On the back of each canvas the artist had written in pencil the story represented, bringing context to patterns of colorful dots and strokes. Artists are paid immediately upon delivering the work to the gallery, so with each sale, money is paid forward for a new commission.

As we read the biographies of the artists, we saw talented yet ordinary members of the local community who were visually translating the stories told to them, often by their grandparents.

“Mandy [Anderson] has been painting for many years and was taught to paint by her mother and grandmother. She paints the stories handed down to her from her grandmother such as the story of six women being chased by a man. She also paints the bushtucker.”

We imagine that these artists, many of whom are parents and grandparents themselves, use their paintings not only to earn income for their families, but also to pass on their stories to the generations that follow.

So the story cycle continues.

We walked away with a handful of paintings, each with a story of an artist, each with a story of continuity. While we knew our purchase would not change things on a grand scale, we felt it a tiny, personal productive step forward.

A Look to the Future?

A trip to Aboriginal Australia can unfold a double-edged story of cultural pride in the face of discrimination and exclusion, a story of changing the equation to create opportunities for Aboriginal people. It’s about celebrating Aboriginal culture and recognizing the strengths and uniqueness of this worldview so that Aboriginal communities might enjoy a newborn grounding, pride and satisfaction.

It’s also the story of how we travelers — wide-eyed, open minded novices — can learn from the Aboriginal sense of relationships based on respect and balance between people, plants, animals and the land. The more I peer into this world, the more I see how we all might benefit by applying this ancient wisdom to our modern lives so we might be better stewards of our ever-fragile world.

The story of Aboriginal Australia today is a story of how each of us, through our engagement, can take part.

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