We would like to give everyone an insight on where we currently stand with travel2change in order to keep everyone in the loop about what’s next.
Looking back, we started travel2change with the thought that traveling can change lives for the better – for travelers and locals. Our core mission is to connect travelers and locals around social travel projects to create positive change for all involved.
From April to June our community generated over 60 ideas on how to travel to create a positive impact on the lives of local communities in an open innovation format. We then set out to make the four most promising projects happen. A small group of travelers went to Kenya, Sri Lanka, Peru and Brazil to collaborate with locals, their communities and organizations to create change. Change for the travelers and change within the communities in the destinations we traveled to. We are happy to report that all projects were a success as you can see in our project report.
But that was only the start. Even though we have done many things in our first six months, for us this is not a sprint, but a marathon. We conducted a cycle of inspiration and realization and gained valuable experiences with our community-based approach to purposeful traveling. What have we learned? For now, I want to highlight three things related to the website:
First, breaking down the project idea submission process into sequential steps should encourage more contributions. Second, our site needs to facilitate more interaction between travelers and locals around the fine-tuning of project ideas. Third, we would like to allow for ongoing idea submissions besides the featured challenge and we would like to run several challenges in the next year.
We are currently working hard on preparing the next round and would greatly appreciate your feedback and input on how you would like to see travel2change evolve. Email us your thoughts and ideas on hello@travel2change.org!
