1. Who are you? Brief description of trips you offer
Joshua Egan, Co-founder, and Director of Business Development for Encountour
Encountour is a social enterprise dedicated to providing college students with an unfiltered look at the world around them through volunteer travel that is accessible and safe. Our goal is to cultivate mutual, cross-cultural understanding and to enable college students to fully appreciate the world we share. We offer spring break trips to Costa Rica and Guatemala, where participants live with families and work with nonprofits on projects such as home-building, environmental conservation, and community development.
Encountour trips are Naked Travel: naked of barriers between peoples and cultures, naked of blinders that prevent travelers from really seeing their destinations. Volunteers are fully engaged with the community in which they work, fully exposed to the realities they encounter, and fully clothed throughout the entire experience.
2. How do you define Responsible Travel?
Our understanding of Responsible Travel is traveling with an inquisitive and open mind. It is an attitude one embraces as he or she enters into another culture as a guest and volunteer. It is being able to recognize and appreciate cultural differences and human similarities free of judgment and full of compassion. It is being able to learn from the experience, and to take that new understanding and continue to find ways to better the world.
3. What does your company do to make sure it travels responsibly?
We make sure that our volunteers genuinely experience a country to the fullest extent. We enable our volunteers to have an intimate and unmediated relationship with the country, its people and culture. We place them in homestays where they will be welcomed as family, so they may realize and develop a human connection with people from a completely different background. Our volunteers are a part of community driven sustainable and impactful projects that allow them to recognize their own potential to be an active, integrated, and influencing member of a global community.
4. Tell us about a successful initiative. And an unsuccessful one - what did you learn?
Our success is reflected in the broadened horizons and the further endeavors of our participants, when they are no longer on an Encountour trip. After a recent trip to Guatemala where he worked alongside coffee farmers, one of our volunteers returned to his campus with an understanding of the oppressive and exploitative economic structure of the coffee industry and created a project proposal. This project would generate revenue for the community of coffee farmers, enlighten his peers to the harsh realities of the international coffee business, and raise money for the Jimmy V Foundation — all in the same venture. This is an example of how Naked Travel has the profound potential to provide global perspective, and inspire people to change the world.
We have also had volunteers who suffered negative experiences due to severe culture shock. Traveling to a foreign country, especially with the intent to do volunteer work, is challenging, even distressing for many people. We have learned that we need to be very clear about the experience someone will have on a Naked Travel trip, and to help cultivate awareness and understanding so that even if we cannot prevent our volunteers from culture shock, we can turn it into a positive experience that engenders compassion and cultural appreciation.
5. What’s some advice you can offer to travelers wanting to travel responsibly?
When you travel, try to accommodate to a country, rather than expect that it accommodate you. Recognize that when traveling to a foreign country, upon your arrival it is you and not the country that is foreign. Always try everything. Try the foods you are offered and try to speak with the people you meet, even if the language barrier makes it more challenging. If you are volunteering, respect the approach by which the nonprofit or community has chosen to achieve their goals, even if you do not understand or agree with the approach; you will gain an appreciation for an alternative way of thinking.
Travel, and especially volunteer travel, can change your entire understanding of the world and your place in it, and part of responsible traveling is never forgetting what you have learned while abroad.
Find out more about Encountour
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