Bringing Progress to Paradise is the story of climbing expedition leader and attorney Jeff Rasley’s trek to a village in a remote valley of Nepal called Basa back in October 2008. What he found was a people thoroughly unaffected by Western consumer-culture values. We will be giving away two copies of Bringing Progress to Paradise by Jeff Rasley…

A mixture of passion to help those less fortunate than myself and the desire to completely immerse myself in another culture led me down the dusty dirt paths of the slums of Mishomoroni, Kenya, to New Hope Orphanage, with the countless rows of wide brown eyes greeting me at every corner. I was 18 and on my own, scared and apprehensive as I had never been out of Europe before, yet I found myself feeling somewhat at home among all of these new, smiling faces…

It’s hard to imagine that traveling four days for six days of volunteer service in Africa would be enough time to bring about anything but a severe case of jet lag. But the trip was eye-opening!

International travel for me isn’t about sightseeing; my adventures are to help orphans have a better life…

Guest post from Carolyn Lane on her journey from voluntourist to founding a non-profit using photography to connect and impact communities around the world.

In 1995, I used a small inheritance from my grandparents to take my first ever “volunteer vacation” with EarthWatch to Lombok, Indonesia. There I experienced being an “invited guest” in another country, as opposed to being strictly a tourist…

We came across this great article on travel philanthropy in Architectural Digest (April 2009) — an indication of how charity and goodwill are playing a growing role in people’s lives when these stories get featured in a design magazine.

Architect Bernard Wharton and his family went on a two-week safari vacation in Kenya’s Masai Mara with Micato Safari, a luxury tour company known to include philanthropic visits in their tours. Wanting to get a balanced view of Africa, they opted to do a daylong philanthropic visit to Mukuru, …

A volunteer vacation to an impoverished community makes a lasting impression on a North Carolina college student

A veteran of several volunteer vacations, North Carolina college student, Melissa Hite, recounted her experience traveling to Belize. She first visited Belize back as a high school senior on a cruise and remembered walking down one strip of Belize City and concluded that the city had nothing to offer and went snorkeling. Then as a college senior, she was given the opportunity to go down to Belize on a two-week service trip and …

We never know what may result from our volunteer travels. Sometimes the impressions made on us may lead to a return trip, other times it may spawn larger ambitions to give back which could lead to a career change or the creation of a business or a non-profit that would give back perpetually or meet a particular need in the world or both. Such is the case of Jan Hanson. We love her story because it embodies the promise and potential of every volunteer and every volunteer trip.
Jan Hanson …