Episode 74 - Liz Tuck, World Challenge

Travel

Apr. 27

What do you think when you hear the words “travel” and “ethics”? If you have traveled a lot you are probably nodding your head saying yes, these two words are important. I am sure you have come across many different experiences of culture, behavior, environment during your travels. Not all of us travel because we want charter or luxury vacations. Some of us travel to gain wisdom or to experience nature or both.

Travel is something we all participate in, no matter how extreme or mundane. This episode explores the small ways we can work toward more sustainable travel practices and ways to create inclusive and ethical experiences.

Education is important in all aspects of life: it teaches us how to work with the government, how to improve our communities, and how to live ethically. Some of you might be wondering, "how is this relevant when I'm traveling?"

Understanding the importance of education within travel and how we can create change through travel is important for us in order to make our business and personal lives more sustainable and ethical.

Christine’s guest today is no stranger to sustainable travel. She is an adventurer, environmentalist, and mindful.

Over several years, Liz has dedicated her time to identifying ethical opportunities for young people to engage with local organizations and communities overseas for mutually beneficial learning and experience exchanges.

More recently, her focus has shifted to the sustainability space where she implemented plans to make her organization climate positive and identified a series of climate-centered targets.

Out of the office, Liz is working on living a low-impact lifestyle, enjoys spending time outdoors and is a regular on her yoga mat.

In this conversation, Christine and Liz discuss the importance of education in the context of travel. They look at ways we can begin to make our businesses and our lives more sustainable, and ways to create ethical community engagement.

Join us for this fun and soulful conversation with Liz Tuck.

In this episode, Christine and Liz discuss:

How travel has been apart of Liz’z life since college
The importance of education in travel
How we can begin to make our businesses and our lives more sustainable
Ways to create ethical community engagement
Steps she used to progress her sustainability strategy
How travel and tourism businesses have changed and evolved since the pandemic

Resources & Links Mentioned in the Episode

To learn more about Liz Tuck and World Challenge, head to https://weareworldchallenge.com/

Follow Liz on your favorite social platform: Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn

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About the Soul Of Travel Podcast

Soul of Travel honors the passion and dedication of the people making a positive impact in tourism. In each episode, you’ll hear the story of women who are industry professionals and seasoned travelers and community leaders who know travel is more than a vacation. It is an opportunity for personal awareness and it is a vehicle for change. We are thought leaders, action takers, and heart-centered change makers.

The guests work in all sectors of the tourism industry. You'll hear from adventure-based community organizations, social impact businesses, travel photographers and videographers, tourism boards and destination marketing organizations, and transformational travel experts. They all honor the idea that travel is more than a vacation and focus on sustainable travel, eco-travel, community-based tourism, and intentional travel.

These conversations are meant to educate, inspire and create community. They are directed to new travelers and seasoned travelers, as well as industry professionals and those who are curious about a career in travel.

If you want to learn about new destinations, types of travel, or how to be more intentional or live life on purpose, join Christine Winebrenner Irick for soulful conversations with her community of fellow travelers exploring the heart, the mind, and the globe. These conversations highlight what tourism really means for the world.

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Credits. Christine Winebrenner Irick (Host, creator, editor.) Liz Tuck (Guest). Original music by Clark Adams. Editing and production by Rayna Booth.

Transcript

KEYWORDS

community, business, organizations, tourism, trip, sustainability, conversation, industry, experience, learning, sustainable, travelers, world, education, community engagement

Christine Winebrenner Irick 00:08

Thank you for joining me for soulful conversations with my community of fellow travelers, exploring the heart, the mind and the globe. These conversations highlight what travel really means for the world. Soul of Travel honors the passion and dedication of the people making a positive impact in tourism. Each week, I'll be speaking to women who are tourism professionals, world travelers and leaders in their communities will explore how travel has changed them and how that has rippled out and inspired them to change the world. These conversations are as much about travel as they are about passion, and living life with purpose, chasing dreams, building businesses, and having the desire to make the world a better place. This is a community of people who no travel is more than a vacation. It is an opportunity for personal awareness, and it is a vehicle for change. We are thought leaders, action takers, and heart centered change makers I'm Christine Winebrenner Irick. And this is the Soul of Travel.

Working in the educational travel sector, Liz Tuck is passionate about the potential for travel to cultivate global awareness and raise the profile of some of the challenges facing the worldwide community. Liz is the community partnership manager and sustainability lead at World Challenge. Over several years, she has dedicated her time to identifying ethical opportunities for young people to engage with local organizations and communities overseas for mutually beneficial learning and experience exchanges.

More recently, her focus has shifted to the sustainability space, where she's implemented plans to make her organization climate positive, and identified a series of Climate Center targets. out of the office, she's working on living a low impact lifestyle, enjoys spending time outdoors and is a regular on her yoga mat. In our conversation, we explore the importance of education in the context of travel. Look at ways we can begin to make our businesses and our lives more sustainable, and ways to create ethical community engagement.

Join me now for my soulful conversation with Liz Tuck.

Welcome to Soul of Travel, I am so excited today to be sitting down with Liz Tuck. And we are going to be talking about education and travel small steps in our sustainability journey and kind of collaboration in the industry. So I'm really looking forward to seeing where this conversation leads us. Thank you so much for joining me today.

03:19

Thanks for having me. Nice to be here.

Christine Winebrenner Irick 03:22

Thank you, for those of you listening. We're recording this the day after International Women's Day. So I'm still kind of sitting here marinating in all these great conversations and webinars that I have gotten to listen to this week. And so I'm really excited to kind of be in my own space here connecting with women who inspire me who are included in this industry. So as we get started I would just love to give you the space to introduce yourself and give our listeners a bit of an idea about who you are in the industry. And then we'll go a little bit further into World Challenge and the rest of our conversation for today.

04:05

Great, thank you. Yeah, so I've actually been working in travel pretty much my whole adult working life since I finished university. But I studied education studies, and I did a master's in education and international development. So I'd had a kind of inkling to get involved in development projects at LinkedIn with education and through that I've done some overseas trips during university which had kind of inspired me to get more involved in the link between travel and philanthropy and education. I actually started out a lot of my career working on international development projects with volunteers.

I was a little jaded by some of that experience and I really grew to see kind of the benefit of those trips as being more on the participants than the hosting communities and that sort of education that they received in the experience and growth that they took away from it. So I actually am now working for an educational travel company, which allows me to kind of hone in on that a little bit more, we still have a lot of connection with destination communities, which I love.

And I'm also now sort of branching out to look more at sustainability and how we can build that into travel, both in the way that we operate, but also in the way that we educate travelers about sustainability and taking those values forward with them. So lots of different things are going on. But lots of different travel experiences. But it's definitely been kind of a big part of my life. And obviously, throughout all of that I spent five years working overseas, I traveled a lot. And I've always kind of had that passion for getting out and exploring and seeing the world as well. So a really great meeting of kind of personal pleasure and work and career

Christine Winebrenner Irick 06:10

goals as well. Thank you thank you for sharing that, I kind of forgot about some of our shared interests, which is actually how, how I found you and connected with you I love, like scouring LinkedIn, and Instagram and just Googling documents about travel and education and sustainability. And just when people are talking a lot about things that I resonate with, like because this is the work I'm doing right now, I'm so fortunate that I can reach out and create connections to learn more. But this idea of, for me, education and travel, when that connection happened for me was really when I saw the value of travel that, you know, this travel experience isn't just this space for disconnection and fun and play. Like that's a really valuable part of travel.

But when I saw that layered with education and learning about culture, and nature and environment, when we travel, I got really excited about what travel can be on a bigger scale. And then I really gravitated toward philanthropy and volunteer travel as well, early in my career. And I think much like you had similar experiences where I realized that while I think the curators of those experiences had such good intentions, in the early parts of that, it was a it was very self serving, like I did really see that it seemed like the people that were doing this type of travel, were doing it to fulfill their own need.

And so I agree with you like, there was this sense of like dis ease with what that looks like and what that was creating. And for me that ended up being like, creating conversations around, okay, why are we traveling, then let's ask that if this is self serving, what are we serving what need needs to be met, and then this is how I kind of landed in the space of transformational travel, if you want to call it that, where you are really unpacking why you're traveling in the first place. And then that creates action, I think from a different space. But I would love it if you wanted to share a little bit more about what that has looked like for you and maybe how your philosophies have changed or what dynamic you set up to create in the space of connecting engagement and, and community engagement in travel.

08:44

Yeah, I'd love to. There's so many things I wanted to say from what you're just saying. Like, I think I mean, the educational travel thing is, you know, there's so many layers to it, like on the really basic levels, simply the kind of idea that people traveling breaks down walls, it builds awareness of different cultures, different societies, different things that are happening around the world. And, you know, even if you don't purposefully try to curate learning through travel, there are still really hopefully for most travelers, a general kind of sense of learning that comes just from taking even the simplest trip but yeah, so when it comes to the kind of philanthropic side of things that community engagement, it's been quite a big journey for me because as I said, like I was a volunteer during university, I traveled abroad to volunteer, I thought that I was doing something really good for the communities that I visited. And I was very, I'm now very aware that I was doing it for my own personal benefit, like I was doing it for a career progression. And I was enjoying the trips at the time.

So there was a lot of personal pleasure to take from that. But I then progressed to work in that industry specifically for quite a few years. And I really saw lots of different kinds of sides to it. And I think, as he kind of alluded to, like, the baseline intention is definitely good. And I think in the majority of cases, these organizations are really trying to kind of push things forward, use this kind of desire of travelers to go and contribute something and build that into something positive for the communities. But there's also a sort of gradual shift, I think towards,

10:40

You know, people, people pay for these experiences, and they have a certain level of expectation of what they should get to experience when they're there. And that doesn't always link up with the reality on the ground and what the community needs and how things work in the community. And it's been quite a significant learning curve. I was really fortunate a few years ago to engage with a fantastic organization called rethink orphanages, through which I learned a great deal about the challenges around orphanage tourism. And that is a whole topic I could probably have a whole conversation with. But the sort of basic outcome of that was that, you know, an orphanage is not a suitable place for a volunteer or tourists to visit, because children living in these settings need specialized care, it's quite difficult for them, if people are coming and going all the time, it's sort of perpetuating some of this sort of talented and the trauma that they're already living through. And also, there are better models of care for children.

So we shouldn't be funding orphanages, and encouraging orphanages, when we should be hopefully encouraging governments to look for family based care and things. But that's a little bit of a tangent. But if you kind of take that forward into other aspects of those kinds of programs and start to think about, you know, is this really appropriate? Is this really the right thing for this person to be doing? There's quite a big disparity between somebody who's a qualified teacher or a doctor or nurse in their home country going to utilize those services in a country where those services are understaffed, or an unqualified person who wants to go and lend a hand on, on something that they're not experienced in, their intentions are great. But they just need to be careful that they're, they're not doing it more, because it's something that they want to do and experience and get than the need of actually being in the destination. So I've done a lot of work on this at Royal challenge.

And we do facilitate community engagement for the students that travel with us. But specifically, we refer to it as community engagement or community initiative, not as a volunteer project, we've made some really big moves away from that, and to really focus on the learning, and all of the experiences that the students have linking to the sustainable development goals. So it's really about connecting with organizations to understand what they're doing to understand the challenges that are faced in the community to understand how they kind of interact on a global scale, which is where the SDGs come in. And some of that learning will take place through sort of hands on activity, but it's not like that hands on activity is going to only happen because the students are there, it's going to happen as part of the local organization, we might make it happen a little bit faster, because we'll provide a little bit of extra support. But we'll also provide financial support to the organization so that they can further their goals. It's all kind of led by them, it's all fitting in with what they're doing. Anyway, it's all kind of about moving their own mission forwards, and giving our students the chance to learn about it, understand it, and then hopefully, take that home with them. And then the real impact comes not from that kind of short visit, but from what you do with what you've learned. So, you know, students might go to a marine conservation project where they learned about the problems of plastic in the ocean.

They might do some beach cleans, you know, they make some positive contributions. But then when they come home, they might reduce their plastic waste. So they might really kind of focus on not buying drinks bottles, not using straws, taking reusable bags to the grocery store, and really kind of move that forward. And then if you think about all those pieces of plastic over many, many years in the future, that they're saving that much bigger, more positive result of that experience. So well, we won't be able to quantify that impact unfortunately. But we So that's kind of the shift that we've gone through to this kind of focus on, you can still collaborate with communities in destinations, you can still learn about their culture, you can still help them to promote their culture through kind of participating in a cookery class or a dance workshop or something that they want to teach and cheer with you. And you can still kind of further these organizational goals without having to go and do everything yourself and participate in activities that you wouldn't necessarily be qualified to do if you're in your home country.

Christine Winebrenner Irick 15:36

Yeah, thank you. There are so many great points there. But I really love the idea of partnering with a community organization that already exists, like you mentioned, really understanding the need supporting actions that are already in place, not coming in and kind of reinventing the wheel. And then also, as you explained, like, it feels like the difference between, as we were talking about earlier, like this kind of more self serving Act is that it just you go, it's done, it ends you go home, versus like this experience that's more immersive and engaged, and interactive, and then reflected upon and then integrated back into your life, like you said, you know, that the moment of action there was beneficial, but it's this long term action as a result of your experience that has this larger impact. And that maybe that's really what the end goal is. And I think that really shifts how you move through the experience.

16:40

Yeah, and I think part of it, it's like self awareness, right. So if you are aware that you are going to benefit, you're going to enjoy that experience, you're going to use it for your CV or your university application or something. That's okay, like, it's okay to know that you're going to benefit from it and to be accepting of that. But if you're also then aware of that kind of potential , what else can I do with what I've learned here? And how can I take that forward, then that's only going to kind of work to amplify the impact. And that's further kind of built into sort of the way that we try to kind of give our travelers some learning around what they'll be doing before they travel during their trip and try and kind of build that sort of growth mindset idea that they can take that learning more broadly and use it in the future, but also giving them the kind of background knowledge and understanding to be able to really gain as much as they can from the experience on the ground. So I think there is like, we're very fortunate to be an educational travel company and be able to do all of that as well. So I'm kind of also aware that it's a bit of a unique space. But yeah, I think awareness is really important. If people are kind of going with the perspective that they're going to save the lives of people in the country that they're visiting, that perspective is quite far off. And I think being just kind of a bit more humble and a bit more aware that you're also going to gain quite a lot. I'm grateful that it is important.

Christine Winebrenner Irick 18:25

Yeah, that's really, really I think that's incredible. The last thing that you said there is, and I think for me, this is where I realized the real value of travel too, is actually being set up in a position where I was coming in as some sort of assumed expert or, you know, that I was coming in with this thing to give or the support to give. And really quickly in a moment, realizing that that wasn't what I was well suited for, and that I was actually receiving so much from this experience, which wasn't what I was mentally prepared for wasn't the context that I thought I was landing in. And so I love that you talk about that because I think that is such a powerful moment when we are humbled through an experience like that, where we realize that this is a mutual exchange, and maybe even uneven in a way that we didn't expect. It's just so amazing. I would love you to mention a little bit about the work you do with the World Challenge. But I would like for you to share more fully what that program is and who it's created for and the type of activities and travel that you are designing there.

19:42

Yeah, sure. So our travelers are high school or secondary school students, and they usually kind of enrolled with us about a year and a half to two years before they traveled. So there's quite a big build up to their trip. And the trips are sort of mostly two to four weeks long, and they're quite adventurous. So they involve different sorts of fun sightseeing and activities, but also tracking and then community engagement. So the students will kind of be fundraising for their trip. And they'll be kind of preparing for the trip throughout that buildup time. So we have a series of kinds of educational resources that they have access to, they travel in groups with their school, so they're able to kind of work through those with their peers, which I think is really positive. And they link in to all kinds of aspects of sustainable development, climate change, different sort of animal welfare, child welfare, different kinds of important issues and travel.

But there's also other elements of the program that are linked to things like mental health, and social wellbeing and personal growth, which gives them a broader kind of insight into what they can gain from the travel experience, and how to really make the most of their time on the trip. So the pre-departure program kind of sets the stage for the trip itself. And then when they are on the trip, they are participating in all these activities, they have a leader who's kind of facilitating some of this learning and discussion and reflection around the different topics. And then the community engagement section of the trip is, like I said, there's quite a lot of them actually were without large number of partners, but they're all local organizations, we kind of I guess, to use the phrase humble, again, we were humbled and realizing, you know, that we're not, we're not experts in running development projects, we're travel, we're experts in travel.

And where we were previously kind of trying to work with individuals on the ground to set things like that up, it really wasn't hugely successful, I don't think for anyone, and we move to working with these organizations that are, you know, like, that's what they do. And we're fitting in with what they do, rather than asking them to create something that works for us specifically. So we really try to be led by them. And I think that's really important. So, you know, they suggest activities and things that they're doing that are ongoing that we can get involved with. But also for a lot of the organizations, it links into part of their sort of mission to raise awareness and educate people on the sort of topics that they're trying to address.

So So yeah, they're really wide ranging, a lot of kind of community based tourism coops where they're able to, you know, generate income for communities through homestay programs and having different sort of cultural interactions, which also gives the communities an opportunity to share some of their traditions and their heritage, which, you know, in a lot of destinations, where development is occurring quite rapidly, they are not able to uphold some of those traditions as much. So actually, tourism can be a really positive vessel for sharing that and maintaining that culture. So there's that kind of thing through things like charitable organizations, NGOs, working on things like conservation, marine conservation, where we're able to get involved in those activities and learn more about the environmental challenges in certain countries. So yeah, very wide ranging, but all kinds of organizations on the ground, who are able to kind of facilitate that experience and learning but also, who were therefore able to support through that visit as well.

Christine Winebrenner Irick 24:07

Hey, it's Christine. Interrupting this episode for just a quick minute to invite you to join me for my get wild in Glacier women's wilderness retreat. I'm so excited to share because last year when I partnered with my friend Becky rob from Trailblazer wellness, we brought women to the top of a fourteener in Colorado, and knew we had to do it again. This year, we're headed to Glacier Park in Montana.

I grew up in northwest Montana and cannot wait to share this treasured corner of the world with you. You'll get to get wild and reconnect with your inner child as you hike, bike, ride horseback and whitewater raft. Not only that, Becky and I spent three months with you preparing for this adventure and creating community. You'll be excited to meet in person and share this adventure with us during these three months. You'll get one-on -one coaching with Becky to prepare for the adventure as well as my Sunset and yoga sessions led by me, an education from other inspiring women about nutrition on the trail, and packing for adventure, as well as learning from local educators about nature and wildlife and indigenous communities. This is a unique experience that adds so much depth to your journey. Registration for this women's wilderness retreat closes on May 20. Our virtual coaching begins on June 6. Visit the Lotus sojourns website for more information.

I cannot wait to share my home with you. Now, let's hop back over to our soulful conversation. I love the pre-departure learning program that you mentioned because I think this is something that I've been leaning towards in my own business and my own business model as well. And I think that's something you and I connected on prior to this conversation. But how important that aspect of travel is, and really lengthening your travel experience to be, you know, the months, weeks or even years prior to travel, the traveling and then kind of what we refer to earlier the reflection and coming back integrating to your life. And then you know, the long term effects of the travel experience. So all of a sudden, this experience goes from being a one week or two week experience to like two or three years like this really becomes a part of your life.

And I think that really shifts what travel can be for you as a traveler, but then also just as a greater tool for good as an industry. And I just imagine, I'm reading this book called Beyond guilt trips, which you might be familiar with. It's by Dr. A new turnoff. And she talks about going and traveling during university, and the experience of not really being able to understand a lot of the emotions that she was going through, like looking at class issues that she was not really having a frame of reference for, you know, for poverty that she hadn't witnessed before. And all these things that the students were all just put together, traveling for a semester, and none of them really had a way to speak about it, then they didn't really understand what they were experiencing. And some of them ended up leaving because it really was just too much for them to even process. And so like giving your students these tools to understand, you know, wildlife tourism, social issues, that they might be coming up against, knowing when to mentally prepare for them to socially have that context for it. But then also to have the ability to talk about it while you're there is going to create such a different experience, I think for those students in the long run. And I don't know if you have seen, you know, what that allows for in terms of understanding of the travel experience?

28:08

Yeah, so actually, as you were speaking, it just reminded me kind of how a lot of which was the orphanage tourism piece. So we used to visit orphanages, that's how we engage with rethink and made the decision to move away from that. We needed to learn ourselves, many, many of us at that organization kind of at the time, didn't understand the challenges associated with that. And when we made the decision to stop visiting orphanages, it needed to be straight away, because we understood the problems. And we were like we can't send one more group or two more groups to an orphanage, like we have to change this now. And we but we'd already had kind of groups who thought they were going to visit orphanages on their trip. So we felt like we can't tell people, oh, you can't do that, you're gonna do something else without giving them the chance to learn and understand why we'd made that decision. And it sort of then applies across lots of different things.

You know, we tell students that they can't ride an elephant on our trips, but we need to explain to them why that's the case because it could become a little bit pointless, really, like we can stop them doing it with us. But then if they really want to do it, they'll just go and do it with somebody else next year or two years later. So we realized that more than just not doing it, drawing the line, cutting it out. We also needed to kind of raise that awareness of it broadly. And I actually met with a group of people from the travel industry in the UK this week who are looking at sort of an orphanage Task Force and how we can raise that away. and more broadly within the travel sector in the sense that, you know, you travel organization who doesn't organize visits to orphanages, still has travelers visiting countries where visits to orphanages are organized, and how can we as an industry play a role in preventing that from happening and protecting those children? So yeah, it's so interesting to think about that. But yeah, it was that we needed to really sort of, not just put the barriers up and draw our own lines, but also make sure that people understood why those lines have been drawn.

And then we, you know, there's that ripple effect. So hopefully, every person that learns about orphanages, through us goes and tells a friend or a family member, if they meet somebody who says, so I'm planning to do that, hopefully, they'll share what they learned. And it can quite quickly sort of ripple out and create a much broader awareness, I think, as loads of benefits to it. But certainly, again, the impact thing goes beyond just that trip. And, you know, you're thinking about the kind of travelers who understand wildlife tourism, and what attractions maybe are or aren't so good to visit are then better equipped and empowered to select the right attractions to visit if they're traveling on their own. And a lot of the people that travel with us, you know, they're finishing high school, so they probably will go on gap years or certainly trips in the next few years more independently. And they'll be able to apply that to their own experiences, and hopefully that we can create more demand for more sustainable sort of travel opportunities as well. Yeah.

Christine Winebrenner Irick 31:46

That is, I think it is so important to like you said, not just drawing the line and leaving it there. I remember being at a travel show, not long after I launched my business. And one of the trips that I have is to Peru, and I had, you know, a lot of people saying, Why aren't you going to Machu Picchu? Why would you go to Peru without going to Machu Picchu? And, you know, I just realized this was the opportunity for me to explain why I wasn't and you know, maybe that would have an impact on how they would perceive visiting over tourist destinations, or dispersing economic benefits are regions that don't normally get travel, and visitors in the country. And so much like you're saying, it's not as much even about drawing the line within your business and your organization and making a decision that has that positive impact, but also having a lot of transparency around the decision.

And if you're looking at, you know, in other types of businesses, maybe not as much as in yours, but drawing in ideal clients that have values that match what your brand has, like, really creating conversations around why you made those decisions is actually going to probably bring the people that you want traveling with you, and is also hopefully inspiring others to just ask questions, get curious, you know, find out what other decisions they can make, that will have an impact, you know, in their lives and in the communities where they travel. And so I just think all of these things that I think we really veered away from in the past, because we didn't want to, you know, we didn't, we didn't want to have these strong social opinions related to our businesses. It's just the opposite. Now, I think it's so important that we're bringing that in you and I were just talking a little bit about, you know, the businesses and travel industry becoming B Corp. And, you know, we're gonna get into climate action. And all of a sudden, this is this place where I think as travelers, we've all had these, like deep passionate ties to conservation and social impact. And they were kind of like little sides, you know, parts of our businesses. And now, we're in this place where we get to build our whole business around those things that really matter to us. And so I think it's a really exciting time to be in the industry.

So I would love to kind of shift our gears here now and start talking a little bit about responsible travel talking about collaboration. I think one of the things you and I really connected on when we first met was this amazing space where we are in this industry right now where we've had to come together in order to survive the last two years. And so many people have been examining all of these different aspects of the industry and creating free resources and tools. So there's this plethora of knowledge and all of these communities. And so it's really shifting how people can show up in the industry. So I'd love to talk to you a little bit about your sustainability journey that kind of rose from This time and travel where we've all had time to reflect and think about what we're doing, maybe more time than we want to have. But what has that looked like for you? And where did that come from? And, and maybe what were your steps in progressing in this journey?

35:15

Sure. Those that have most said, once again, I'm kind of latching onto. So I guess we have grown our sustainability strategy from those kinds of roots. So we, you know, the, we've moved away from elephant riding, and kind of taken a bit of a stance on animal welfare, and then the orphanage piece arose. And that forced us to take a bigger stance on how we were engaging with communities really look into the ethical side of that build processes to make sure that we're meeting the ethical standards that we wanted to uphold and kind of shift away from that old view of sort of volunteering and helping communities more to this sort of learning and engagement piece. So we kind of started on this sustainability and responsible travel journey from that.

And in providing education about orphanages to travelers, we realized that we could expand that education to be more about how to travel responsibly, so we could cover the orphanage piece, but we could provide a bit of a wider ranging piece of learning for the travelers. And that's obviously then grown and grown to now we have a lot of resources. But initially, they were sort of half day responsible travel workshops that students would participate in. So all of those things kind of laid the foundation for us to start to think about what other areas of responsible travel and sustainability do we want to get into. And just before the pandemic began, we signed up to tourism because of the climate emergency, which is a great community of organizations who are committed to taking climate action, and are sort of willing to fly the flag and push themselves forward and support each other. So we signed up and then the pandemic hit. And we had just to really focus on sort of what trips were needing to be canceled, what we're going to do for that, that sort of initial time when things were really kind of 100% halted. And we came into sort of the beginning of 2021.

And we were due to submit it was kind of coming up a year from signing up to tourism decliners. And we were due to submit a climate action plan and it felt like the right time to be like, Okay, what is our Climate Action Plan, like, this is a huge elephant in the room for sustainability, because it is such a huge part of sustainable travel. And we haven't yet really nailed any kind of strategy, we've kind of banded around some ideas and made a few moves, but we needed to really kind of get it down. And we kind of grew and grew from there really quickly. So I spent a large amount 2021, educating myself on climate action, carbon footprinting, and what what we could do as an organization, what opportunities were out there, how we could take that forward, what we could kind of apply to our business and upskilling myself from there.

38:42

So it was definitely a really huge learning curve, but it was kind of this area that felt like the big piece that still needed to be addressed. And kind of, yeah, it felt just really, really important to get into. And I think, kind of now that we've done it, and we're on the other side, although there's still lots of ongoing work, it feels like we've kind of rounded out that strategy. Now. You know, we're looking at all these different areas of our business and we're kind of now in this sort of flow state where we're constantly picking up the most ethical, the most sustainable, the most responsible option as a priority in a lot of our decision making as well.

So it's, it's nice to kind of feel like that sort of embedded in our culture and I it was something I actually thought of when you started to speak about kind of sustainable travel and I have this kind of thought process at the moment that I keep getting a little bit lost in but around kind of how right now you can have people choose an organization because it's sustainable and there are sustainable or not sustainable travel organizations and different values. And I sort of hope that ultimately, everyone who likes sustainable travel will not be the golden Anything that's over here, it will be the main sort of bulk of the travel industry. And they'll be sort of not sustainable over there that nobody really kind of has lots of interest in. So, yeah, that was kind of playing on my mind, as you were speaking as well, hopefully, we're seeing like a bit of a shift towards that. And I think the pandemic has provided a lot of opportunity for a lot of businesses to just kind of change the way that they're doing things anyway, they may as well embed a bit of a more sort of sustainable approach. Yeah,

Christine Winebrenner Irick 40:33

I agree. I think, you know, as you talked about, organizations like tourism declares, like, there's, there's just so many more resources available now, for businesses, and especially small businesses, because this is not an easy thing to tackle. Because it's so broad, it's so far reaching within your industry, it really touches everything that you do, once you start picking away at it, you realize like, this is going to take some effort. So there's something to acknowledge and the people that are, are just at the beginning of this and, and haven't gotten there yet.

That is it's a very, it's, it's a long journey, it does take a lot like I will say, I'm also in the beginning of this, I'm very passionate about doing it. And all of the choices I've ever made for my business come from the knowledge I already have. But I don't like this whole formalized statement. And I've really been looking at resources to figure out, you know, okay, let's start looking at this really doing an analysis of what do I have in place? How can I quantify what sustainable development goals are, you know, working towards what goals my business wants to stand for on a whole, like really starting to formalize? So I think a lot of businesses had elements of this or have elements of this in place, but they haven't quantified it. So I think you've got businesses that are like, I don't really know what this is, I'm curious about it, you've got businesses that are like, I don't really want anything to do with it. And then you've got businesses like I'm in the middle of it. And then we've got lots of businesses saying, Hey, I have committed to this. This is my plan. This is because I'm transparent about my actions. And so I think people, I think it's fair to acknowledge that there's people at all different places with this. And then also, like you've said, I really think the bigger vision for this industry is to be that we don't even have to talk about sustainable travel as a goal or as a category that like travel is sustainable. We have made the shift as an industry. And, you know, what else are we looking towards?

But I think that that is something that maybe 10 years ago would have seemed like a complete impossibility, five years ago, maybe two years ago, but I really do think now we're sitting in rooms with so many people who are really dedicated to creating this and kind of going back to what I said initially about collaboration and mentorship and these organizations is that not only are we wanting to do it for our own businesses, we want to help others to achieve the same goals. And so this spirit of collaboration that has arisen out of this movement, I think, is really shifting the dynamic of travel on a whole. And I don't know if you want to speak to any of your experiences with that. I know you very much started with Googling, like, what is decarbonising? What does my business mean? You know, like, how do I do that, which many of us have done? I think that's a super fair place to start. But what resources have you used? And what would you give as a suggestion for people who are somewhere on this spectrum? I guess like

43:55

When it comes to a lot of parts of the kind of business where we're competitive, we don't like to give away too many of our ideas for somebody else to take. But when it comes to sustainability, I think one of the really amazing parts about working in that field in the tourism industry is that everybody wants tourism to be more sustainable. Everybody wants to protect the environment to reduce the impact that tourism has on climate change. So people aren't trying to hold on to their knowledge and be the best at reducing their carbon emissions so that nobody else can be as good as them like they want everyone to be good at reducing their carbon emissions because it benefits all of us if everyone reduces our carbon emissions. So when I started to work on the climate action plan, I was supported by quite a few other people in the industry who are also either at similar stages or slightly further ahead than me and a lot of those connections came through the tour. wasm declares community. So I was really fortunate to be able to kind of just call certain people up and say, like, hey, I want to start measuring my carbon footprint, what should I look at. And, you know, I was guided by them to things like carbon conversion factors, which are absolutely incredible resources. The UK government has a whole host of publicly accessible carbon conversion factors, which are essentially just figures by which you multiply everyday numbers, things like number of miles traveled, number of kilowatts of electricity used, and they give you an estimate of the carbon emissions generated by that thing.

So they provide this incredible framework of what to measure. And things, which are all linked in as well to the greenhouse gas protocol, which is a great, great resource as well. And, allow you to start making measurements for yourself. So I think for a lot of small organizations, and also a lot of organizations that have been impacted by the pandemic and have got a limited resource. The fact that you can begin to do some of this stuff on your own, and you don't need to hire consultants, or bring in expert staff members really starts to break down some of those barriers and make people feel like I can start to make some steps. So they're me kind of being part of that community opened a lot of doors, I've since joined as a volunteer, so that I can be a little bit more involved in what tourism declares is doing tourism declares is actually recently joined forces with a number of other organizations and travel to launch the Glasgow declaration for climate action, which is a basically a declaration for anyone in the in the tourism, any tourism business to commit to taking climate action aligned with sort of IPCC targets for reducing emissions. And they will, I think it's not quite fully formed yet. But there is lots of guidance on how to build a Climate Action Plan.

One of the requirements, if you sign up, is to submit a climate action plan within a year. And there's a whole sort of framework of that. So instantly, you have kind of the key areas that you should be thinking about measuring, reducing, and, you know, it starts to starts to give some shape that has communities, then you can sort of link in with other people start to network with people who are working on similar things to you bounce ideas around. And then there's also lots of great travel companies. I mean, there are plenty that just sort of publicly share what they're doing as well. And rather than kind of holding it, like you said, too close to their chests that are really willing to kind of share it so that others can see what they've done, and hopefully learn something from that and apply it to their own businesses. So it's definitely a space where collaboration is really big. And it's really, really nice to kind of see people sort of sharing their learning, sharing their knowledge, sharing their ideas. Really just united by common purpose, I guess, but a really nice kind of space to be in.

Christine Winebrenner Irick 48:26

Yeah, I was gonna say exactly that. It's such a nice space to be in, because it really, it just, it brings about this sense of community. And I think, as business owners, you know, we're, we're typically taught about or, you know, as professionals, you know, to be like, you will only be at the top, if you have all of the answers, like you said, hold it to your chest, don't let your secrets out. All you know, it's, I have to be at the top of the pyramid. And it, I think, for a lot of people, especially those I've met in this industry, like we're in this industry, because we actually believe in the whole of humanity and the good of humanity. And we want to take travelers to experience that. And so it's almost counterintuitive to who we are to then run a business this way. And I feel like actually, and in my space, being in the entrepreneurial world being an entrepreneurial woman, like there's this almost like Failure to Launch because we don't thrive in that setting.

And I just think that this shift to this space is also going to create a lot more success for these businesses that are really impact driven and mission driven and heart centered and all these things you didn't use to say about business at all. And then the other thing about asking questions like okay, if you're the CEO Have a company and you don't know about reducing emissions? Are you going to actually go somewhere and say, I don't know how to do this at all? Can someone show me? This is not the way that these types of people normally interact with one another. And so I think bringing that humanity to business is also what I feel like this movement is doing. And I'm really curious about what that will shift overall.