Educational adventure tours in South East Asia funding development programs
Location
PEPY offers volunteer, adventure, and educational tour options designed with community input which provide funding for long-term, innovative educational development programs.
Your idea
This will be the address used to plot your entry on the map.
Street Address
Tonle Bassac
City
Phnom Penh
State/Province
Postal/Zip Code
Country
Cambodia
Year innovation began
2005
Geotourism Challenge Addressed by Entrant
Quality of benefit to the people of the desitination
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Indicate sector in which you principally work
Tourism-related business
Geographic location
Multiple locations.
Plot your innovation within the Mosaic of Solutions
Main insight addressed
Education through hands-on experience
Name Your Project
Educational adventure tours in South East Asia funding development programs
Describe Your Idea
PEPY offers volunteer, adventure, and educational tour options designed with community input which provide funding for long-term, innovative educational development programs.
Innovation
What is the goal of your innovation?
To offer educational tour options designed with community input which provide consistent funding for innovative development solutions
How does your approach support or embody geotourism?
PEPY's model provides a means of allowing short-term travelers to impact long-term change. PEPY takes sustainability seriously in the trip designing process, choosing local, environmentally conscious, and/or socially-positive hotel and restaurant options whenever they are available. PEPY's sustainable tourism practices and environmental impact are reasons that travelers choose PEPY. In addition to funding local development programs in these areas, sustainable tourism and development are explored on the tours as educational topics for the participants themselves through visits to local development organizations. Many PEPY Tours involve working with local groups to teach environmental education classes in Cambodian schools. Profits from PEPY Tours fund the ongoing educational projects of The PEPY Ride, a registered non-governmental organization, and are fed directly back into the local communities visited on the tours.
Describe your approach in detail. How is it innovative?
Many volunteer travel options provide episodic spectacles for the sake of the tourists, often affecting little more than a layer of paint on a wall. PEPY makes funding and volunteer opportunity decisions with long-term impact in mind. If our travelers paint a fence, it is not just a fence we found that needs painting, but a fence at a school where we have a long standing relationship, fund year-long educational programs, support local teachers, and work with community input. We ask the communities if they would like foreign visitors and what projects they could help with while they are there. It seems like an obvious step, but many times people forget to ask. Our tours are not designed from a distant travel agency but within the communities themselves. Positive impact on the communities we work with, integrity of the funds we distribute to development programs, and community involvement in our decision making are keys to our success. Our tour leaders, trip developers, and sales team are all based in South East Asia and are committed to creating tours which are intended to give travelers a chance to learn as much as give back. We make sure to include opportunities for the communities we visit to act as the teachers as well, so travelers recognize they are not only giving, but receiving, both education and inspiration.
What types of partnerships or professional development would be most beneficial in spreading your innovation?
Our areas of need include marketing expertise and technology solutions for web-based tour booking and data tracking. It would also be useful to develop partnerships with international educational institutions who could help us design and certify our educational programs so that foreign students could earn school credit by coming on our tours. Networking with educators who work in social entrepreneurship and sustainable tourism/development synergies would be useful as well because they might find our solution worthy of research or promotion.
Impact
In one sentence describe what kind of impact, change, or reform your approach is intended to achieve.
We aim to allow short-term travelers to impact long-term development in both the organizations and communities they visit and in their own lives.
Describe the degree of success of your approach to date. Clearly define how you measure quantitative and qualitative impact in terms of how your approach contributes to the sustainability or enhancement of local culture, environment, heritage, or aesthetics? How does your approach minimize negative impacts? 200 words or less
PEPY supports full-time programs in the communities we visit on our tours, so our impact is monitored continuously. We aim to positively impact education and use a variety of metrics to assess our impact. For example, on most PEPY Tours, guests visit the Angkor temples with students from The PEPY Ride School. We have chosen fourth grade students because the majority of school drop-outs happen in third grade. On-going projects plus the incentive of an educational trip to Angkor Wat in fourth grade, drop-outs have decreased by over 10%. Guests on our tours and their fundraising support our Bike-to-School Program, which allows students to earn a bicycle through high attendance and graduation from 6th grade. PEPY’s successful and ongoing impact is monitored through their increase in school attendance, attendance levels of parent and community meetings about education, enrollment and attendance in secondary school, and feedback from the teachers and community. Tour participants are also involved in our environmental education lessons, games, and books. As our environmental lessons are reinforced with each trip, all of the school grounds and surroundings have become remarkably cleaner and students now self-monitor and remind each other to use the garbage cans. At one school, students used to drink from the pump which was proven to have high levels of bacteria. The students worked with a PEPY tour group to design a mural on the wall next to the pump highlighting the need to use a water filter. Now, one year later, no one in the community drinks out of the pump, all students use the filters and can now bring water home with them at night from the classroom filters, and there has been a distinct increase in the number of homes with filters in the community. We are currently conducting a rural participatory survey which will provide more exact numbers of home filtration systems.
How does your program promote traveler enthusiasm, satisfaction, and engagement with the locale?
Facilitated local interaction is the basis of our tours. Everyone sees Angkor Wat. Not everyone gets to see it with a class of students who come from a village only 65km away in which only 5 out of 541 students had seen the famous temple emblazoned on their flag. By exposing our guests to the importance of this day for the students and their families, their enthusiasm increases. We have learned to set the expectations for our guests, who often see volunteering as giving physical labor, so that they realize in advance that often this one-on-one interaction with community members is the biggest gift they are giving to our on-going programs. If community members see wealthy foreigners drinking out of the filters that is reassurance that the water is indeed safe. Filter use increases after our tours visit and travelers are aware that theiir impact far outlasts their stay. Our monthly newsletters keep them informed of the ongoing impact, increasing enthusiasm even after the tour has finished
Describe how your innovation helps travelers and local residents better understand the value of the area’s cultural and natural heritage, and educates them on local environmental issues. How do you motivate them to act responsibly in their future travel decisions?
Before participants travel with PEPY, we provide information about our environmental education and development programs and the areas in which they will interact with those programs during their trip. We introduce our guests to local environmental and heritage preservation groups, teach Cambodia’s dos and don’ts to increase our positive impact, and follow our trips with a reminder email about how to make their future trips and daily life more environmentally friendly. Our annual PEPY calendar includes monthly ideas about minimizing your negative impact! One of the reason we are able to impact their decisions in the long term is that our tours allow for daily group reflection time. Guests are encouraged to provide their own ideas about how we can improve our environmental and community impact, both for PEPY Tours and in their own lives. This gives them ownership of these initiatives, incentive to enact them themselves, and satisfaction when they inspire others to do the same.
In what ways are local residents actively involved in your innovation, including participation and community input? How has the community responded to or benefited from your approach?
When planning community visits, we work with the community leaders to determine what activities are needed and appropriate for our tours. For our original tours, our suggestions would quickly be approved, perhaps from fear that speaking out would mean all relations would be ended between their community and PEPY. Due to our extended and visible presence in the community, we have found that the non-profits, teachers, and communities we work with have realized we are making a long-term commitment and are now open and honest about their issues and needs. They are also now the ones who generate ideas for our visiting groups as well as inform us if they think there might be a negative outcome from an activity we are considering. The reaction of the communities and groups we are working with has been positive and many who turn away other “tours” have welcomed PEPY as a partner. PEPY has brought in over $300,000 of funding for development programs in Cambodia since our first tour in 2005.
This Entry is about (Issues)
Sustainability
Is your initiative financially and organizationally sustainable? If not, what is required to make it so? What is the potential demand for your innovation?
Our organization was created and designed to be financially sustainable, funding not only the tour operation itself but on-going development programs. PEPY has a unique two-part fee structure that requires guests to pay both a trip fee and a donation/fundraising minimum. This ensures the integrity of their donations by providing those funds directly to our non-profit partners. Furthermore, many participants tend to fundraise over the minimum required amounts, allowing for increased funding for the non-profit. The demand for our innovation is limitless. This is the travel option global travelers are looking for when they seek out “off the beaten path,” “responsible,” and “adventurous” travel.
How is your initiative currently financed? If available, provide information on your finances and organization that could help others. Please list: Annual budget, annual revenue generated, size of part-time, full-time and volunteer staff.
Currently PEPY is run by 6 full-time and 1 part-time Cambodian staff members. Throughout the year we have 4-8 full-time unpaid foreign volunteers who typically commit to work for long periods of time and so are offered accomodation in our office’s upper floors. The annual budget for PEPY Tours is $150,000..In addition, in 2007 the tours raised over $150,000 for educational programs, funded the construction of the second PEPY school, initiated a Bike-to-School Program at two schools in order to provide students with bicycles as a means of accessing secondary schools, and more!
What is your plan to expand your approach? Please indicate where/how you would like to grow or enhance your innovation, or have others do so.
Our internal limiting factor in the speed of our growth is identifying and qualifying potential development projects and partners. We have already identified partners in Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, Nepal, and East Timor and are looking to expand into those countries over the next 5 or more years. Laos and Vietnam are already on our schedule for 2008 and 2009 respectively. Through identifying like-minded partner non-profit organizations who already have monitoring and evaluation systems and staff in place in the areas we are expanding too, we are able to fund the expansion of their M&E programs to ensure that our partnership decisions and tour impact is having the intended effect on the communities. We will always design our tours with the help of PEPY staff and volunteers who are familiar with our currently working in the areas we visit so that we can build upon their community connections and maximize the number of eyes monitoring and reflecting on our impact.
What are the main barriers you encounter in managing, implementing, or replicating your innovation? What barriers keep your program from having greater impact?
Our biggest current barrier is exposure. We are offering the type of tour product current travelers are crying out for, but our tiny voice is not yet being heard far and wide. The rate at which we can identify and qualify partners while maintaining a commitment to limiting our invasive or negative impacts limits our growth rate. However, this does not limit our growth potential. We are growing at a rate we find sustainable, but we would benefit from increased exposure to our work to fill the tours which we currently offer and thus increase our impact. We have internally imposed limiting factors such are our own commitment to limit our tour visits to schools to a maximum of three visits per year to minimize distractions. We are already identifying potential future partners so that if our growth increased exponentially we would not need to rush our partner selection and end up supporting non-trustworthy people or programs. Cambodia’s needs are visible and widespread, so many people think it is be easy to find beneficiaries for our funding and volunteer time, but that is not the case. With high levels of corruption, PEPY makes partnership decisions based on transparency, management interviews, trial programs, and on-going monitoring and evaluation, so pre-qualifying our partners allows us to prepare for future expansion.
The Story
Please provide a personal bio. Note this may be used in Changemakers' marketing material.
Daniela Papi graduated from Notre Dame University with a degree in Economics, worked for a consulting firm, and then left to work and travel through Asia. She knew volunteer travel was for her when she joined a volunteer trip to Nepal in 2002. She began to only travel with volunteer groups and enjoyed her trips but found that some seemed designed solely to provide a heart-warming experience for the foreign travelers, had a religious agenda, or didn’t provide much transparency and accountability regarding their funding. She and her friend, Greta Arnquist, decided to plan a cycling adventure through and dubbed their tour PEPY, “Protect the Earth. Protect Yourself.” because they were looking to fund environmental and health education programs. The first PEPY Ride funded the construction of The PEPY Ride School and has led to over $300,000 in fundraising for education programs, over 20 volunteer and adventure trips, the creation of an NGO based in Phnom Penh, and the opening of PEPY Tours.
What is the origin of your innovation? Tell your story.
There is a non-profit on every corner in Cambodia, but sometimes they all seem to be in competition with each other for limited funding. The populations of tourists visiting Cambodia is growing exponentially and most of them state a desire to “help” but don’t know the best way to do so. Seeing both of these things and looking for an adventure besides, Daniela Papi and Greta Arnquist decided to cycle across Cambodia to learn more. They were joined by a team of four friends who raised funds to support educational non-govermental organizations (NGOs) they had identified. On their five week ride, they learned that donations need to be treated like investments that are researched and monitored after the check has been written. They also learned that many NGOs are more concerned about their donors than the communities they are supposed to benefit and that sustainable tourism requires education on both the parts of the local vendors as well as the travelers themselves. Greta and Daniela also discovered that many other people were interested in traveling by bike across Cambodia too. Thus, PEPY was born. PEPY provides sustainable funding for education programs, allowing them to focus on doing good work rather than searching for funds. PEPY provides educational opportunities for Cambodian students, community groups, and travelers that focuses on environmental protection and sustainable tourism practices. PEPY provides a way for travelers to find out about the smaller grassroots organizations who are making big changes and to see those projects first-hand and PEPY hopes to inspire tour participants to become advocates for the groups they visit.
Please write an overview of your project. This text will appear when people scroll over the icon for your entry on the Google map located on the competition homepage.
PEPY offers volunteer, adventure, and educational tour options designed with community input which provide funding for long-term, innovative educational development programs.
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 | ctw said: double post about this Competition Entry. - 1365 days ago read more > |
| ctw said: Among the MANY things that impress me about PEPY is how thorough they are with all that they do. They have so many innovative programs ... about this Competition Entry. - 1365 days ago read more > |
| Beth Conway said: Hi Mandy, I agree with you completely -- the word "failure" in these situations does not quite work, simply because "failing" is ... about this Competition Entry. - 1374 days ago read more > |
| Beth Conway said: ---------- Travel well. Beth Conway Adventure Life www.Adventure-Life.com about this Competition Entry. - 1374 days ago read more > |
| Mandy Gatewood said: Daniela, I'm really glad to see this discussion happening. I wonder a lot also about the impact of volunteers on the area they want to ... about this Competition Entry. - 1375 days ago read more > |
| Mandy Gatewood said: Beth, It was so interesting to read your comment. I remember going to one of PEPY's partner organizations in Cambodia, RDIC. A tour ... about this Competition Entry. - 1375 days ago read more > |
| Beth Conway said: My pleasure, Daniela! It is certainly a collaborative effort... ---------- Travel well. Beth Conway Adventure ... about this Competition Entry. - 1380 days ago read more > |
| danielapapi said: Thank you so much for the post, Beth! I appreciate what you said about finding organizations to support that are doing "good", and how ... about this Competition Entry. - 1380 days ago read more > |
| danielapapi said: Thanks for the thoughts Dave. I agree very much with the questions you ask. One of the biggest problems we found we were doing in the ... about this Competition Entry. - 1381 days ago read more > |
| Beth Conway said: I was first introduced to PEPY at the Adventure Travel World Summit in Whistler, Canada last October. It was a pleasure. How ... about this Competition Entry. - 1383 days ago read more > |
Comments
Daniela, Check out http://www.justmeans.com.
JustMeans is like Idealist. Their goal is to connect companies providing a socially responsible product or service with individuals interested in the field. If you are looking to hire, you can post PEPY's need for marketing expertise and technology solutions.
Hi Amy -
We looked into JustMeans and it looks like it would be a great place to look for PEPY support. Thanks for the information!
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Daniela Papi
PEPY Founder
www.pepyride.org
I was lucky enough to be chosen as a leader for a February 2008 ride through southern Cambodia, and from this experience I saw that the kind of development work that PEPY is doing is multi-pronged and innovative.
PEPY uses money raised by tourists to fund development projects at schools. Then the tourists come to Cambodia and teach environmental awareness at schools and work on development projects. Some former projects involve building rainwater collection units, helping produce water filters for rural families, and creating a community economic empowerment program in Koh Ker.
The cycle of tourists give to Cambodia --> Cambodia gives to tourists is unbeatable.
PEPY, keep up the good work! I'm inspired by your work and can't wait to see where you go in the future!
Thanks for the support, Mandy!
I went on a PEPY tour for Spring Break 2007. Since then, I have traveled to Europe, Las Vegas, and Mexico, none of which have been even close to the amazing, inspiring experience the people at PEPY provide! I learned much about Cambodia and responsible travel, and hope I will be able to have another PEPY adventure.
I'm glad to hear you loved your experience so much -- we loved you being on the trip! Check out our website to see what's in the works with us -- we've got a trip from LAOS to Cambodia coming up this winter, and other exciting trips besides. We hope to see you again soon Cara!
My first trip with PEPY was building a rainwater collection unit at a rural elementary school outside of Phnom Penh. Although I had participated in volunteer projects before I never felt like I was working with a group of people who were so passionate about the project and place we were. PEPY does an amazing job of introducing people to Cambodia, its people and culture while also doing amazing work. I loved the country and the people I was working with, so I came back for more! I just co-led the March ride from Phnom Penh to Kratie and it was incredible. So physically challenging and emotionally fulfilling. It was so special to see our participants open their eyes and hearts to the people of Cambodia while riding a bike through the back roads of Cambodia. These tours and the resulting programs and projects PEPY supports are one of a kind and I will continue to work with them and be inspired by them. Because traveling changed my life, and now I can use travel to help change the lives of others!
Caroline, you've added so much to the energy and organization of PEPY and its programs. Thanks for all your help and for committing to using travel as a force for good! You rock, awesome lady!
PEPY is a fantastic group of people committed to change in Cambodia. I love their work and their enthusiasm for transforming an often destructive industry - tourism - into a positive force for education and sustainable development. In a country where 40% of the population is under the age of 16 and where tourism and other industries are only in their infancy, PEPY's work is imperative. An empowered and inspired group of people doing empowering and inspiring things.
B, PEPY loves you too! Thank you for getting on board with us and for understanding PEPY so intimately!
PEPY stands out as the only group I know of who have successfully bridged the gap between voluntourism and a long-term, sustainable approach to effecting genuine development. This enables volunteers to see and enjoy a large part of Cambodia and the work that happens there while knowing their contribution will live on long after they have left. Amazing!
Joe, you've hit the nail on the head. It's so important to us that the short-term work that our volunteers do becomes part of a larger framework of empowerment so that we make lasting changes in Cambodia. Thanks for the insightful vote of confidence!
My first PEPY trip and the folks on it literally changed my life. I studied development in graduate school and thought I knew what I was going to be seeing and experiencing. My views completely shifted by seeing the work on the ground firsthand and meeting with the different NGOs that PEPY put us in touch with. I came away with a much more realistic and complete view of development and the non-profit sector which has been incredibly beneficial to me in my work since then.
I also had a fabulous time! Riding through the backroads of Cambodia, with kids running out of rural houses each day to wave and cheer you on just can't be beat. Since PEPY I've even been inspired to lead my own trips, which have snowballed into others from that trip doing the same thing. Including myself, 3 people from the cycling trip I led post PEPY (which was raising funds for Hurricane Relief ), have led their own trips and raised their own funds for other causes. To me, there is no better example of success than this----empowering others to keep making a difference in their own homes and in their own ways. Thanks PEPY!
Hi Lou!
What a great story. Knowing that PEPY has meant so much to you and influenced your work so much lets us know that we're doing the right thing! It's the office's feel-good story of the afternoon!
PEPY connects the traveller not only with Cambodia and Cambodians but with many of the incredible NGO's working on issues from providing clean drinking water to villages and increasing access to education to furthering Cambodian traditional arts. By joining a PEPY tour you can support these causes AND you can learn about them first hand. During my travels with PEPY I have been fortunate enough to meet with some of the most inspiring individuals that are making a difference in Cambodia today. These people have encouraged me to make many positive changes in my life. If you want to travel responsibly, PEPY is the way to go!
We're so happy to have your support! Thank you for believing in PEPY and for traveling with us!
(sorry, double-posted!)
Being an intern at PEPY has been the most rewarding, challenging, and educational experience of my life. PEPY works really hard to make sure that our work benefits those its supposed to and leaves both Cambodians and foreigners with the I-can-do-it spirit! Such a simple and functional idea has led to so much change in the schools we work in... After five months in Cambodia, I can already see the excitement that students have to come to school and learn, and I can see students' eyes opening wider to the world. I love hearing students' dreams: to go to high school, to be a teacher, to travel to Angkor Wat. Nih-seut t'wer baan dtay!
I had the privilege of taking part in the August 2007 trip as well as the December PEPY Ride III - experiences that are hard to sum up in a small comments box! While I've been part of volunteer trips before, what amazes me the most about PEPY is how much I learn, and not in a sugar-coated or all-knowing way, but passionate, raw and honest. We learned about amazing, local organizations doing incredible things, as well as the mistakes they've made, what they've learned, and the steps they continue to take to make their programs better. We learned about different perspectives on development and rather than learning through textbooks or the websites of large organizations, I gained a perspective from the realities on the ground. My time with PEPY was more than I could have hoped for. It was an incredible opportunity to be exposed to a number of socially responsible organizations, learn about the simplicity of development principles and the challenges of implementing them successfully. I was struck by how I started to think differently and realized how little I knew and how much I wanted to learn more. I enjoyed listening, learning and challenging the wealth of knowledge of both the PEPY staff and their partners (that they share honestly), and formulating new perspectives I didn't have before. Experiential learning never felt so sweet!
While PEPY is making a difference through their programs here in Cambodia, they also made a difference in me. While I walked away with great memories, pictures I will always cherish, and a strong love for Cambodia, I also walked away with a changed and more informed perspective, a deeper understanding of what successful, sustainable development is, a strong personal momentum of knowledge-seeking, and a desire to continue contributing to causes I believe in. Thank you PEPY!!
Oh gosh, reading that gave me goosebumps. That is EXACTLY what PEPY strives to do for each person who comes on a tour. We're SO HAPPY to hear that your experiences helped awaken you to aid issues in the developing world.
Much love!
The PEPY Team
I would love to get a discussion going about the impact of volunteers. I think one of the biggest issues we face in the "volunteer tourism" world is analyzing if our impact really IS positive. It is much easier for us to measure our impact on the travelers themselves. Repeat customers and referrals are just some of the many easy indicators that our trips are impacting travelers positively.
When it comes to the communities, issues, and people "volunteer" trips are supposed to be working for, sometimes the monitoring and evaluation is much harder. Especially for groups who might not have as much full time presence in the areas they work. Even though we live here and see our impact daily, it is STILL sometimes hard to measure the "good" being done by volunteers. If I didn't think the impact was much more good than bad though, I wouldn't still be here.
I would love to hear other comments from people about this issue, and perhaps ideas from others who have done M&E for NGO and voluntourism projects who can reflect on their successes in this area.
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Daniela Papi
PEPY Founder
www.pepyride.org
One of the common critiques this type of tourism typically gets is "why don't you just send a check? Why pay for a flight, hotels, etc?" One of the keys for PEPY is to make sure that travelers are paying for their tours and are not able to fundraise for their trip costs. This helps remind them that it's a learning experience and a life changing tour - for THEM, the traveler, and hence, this is an experience WORTH paying for. We also then commit to providing them with a tour and a valuable experience, not just having people pay to work. We are not trying to "compete" with Peace Corps, but with your average tour, offering a better way to see the things they were going to see already, and leaving a positive impact not only on their trip itself but in the funds they have raise to support ongoing work and the ways that they change their own lives and future travel choices.
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Daniela Papi
PEPY Founder
www.pepyride.org
Daniela,
Just let me say - I'm a huge fan of the work you are doing with PEPY! I'm inspired and continue to learn from your experiences.
You bring up an excellent question about volunteer tourism being good and very pertinent monitoring issues. As we are just starting up programs with WAVES for Development, addressing both are super important to having a sustained positive impact.
We find ourselves asking: "Do we want to have a big impact on a few people or a smaller impact on a lot more?" What is the ideal equation? This gets even more complicated as we consider both the youth and the voluntourists. In terms of monitoring the impact on communities - smiles and 'stoke' at the time are easy to assess, and emails from older youth participants after also give some insight into our impact. A lot of websites have past volunteer comments. I wonder how many think about including comments from the community members?
While I don't think the 'answers' are ever simple when dealing with impact and monitoring, I applaud you for posing the questions and want to join the dialogue.
let there be WAVES,
Dave Aabo
www.WAVESforDevelopment.org
Thanks for the thoughts Dave. I agree very much with the questions you ask. One of the biggest problems we found we were doing in the beginning was asking our guests to fill out long pages of post-trip reviews, but never asking the community more than "how was it?". It is important for me now to point out to our guests that the community is involved in our work, and even more important than that, WE are involved in our work. Too often social impact tour operators are only as involved in the communities as the guests they bring, dropping in with travelers and returning months later with a few more. It if wasn't for the time we spend working in the communities OUTSIDE of the tour times, we would never know when we were making mistakes.
One of the most distressing things I see when browsing the cyberspace of our NGO and responsible tourism world, is websites patting themselves on the back and quoting numbers of successes with no hint of failures. When did we get too afraid to admit failures? I might go so far as to believe that if you are not failing now and then, then you are not trying hard enough! We learn from our failures - the boundaries, the real needs. We need to change this culture of always needing to be right and start to admit that we need to learn and improve from being wrong sometimes.
When it comes to making a new brand of soap, everyone excepts failures the first few rounds. When it comes to lives and education, development and tourism, failures can mean harming people, and no one wants to admit that. But we must, or those who are working in these areas will continue to be too afraid to monitor their projects for fear of what they know they will find: they weren't always right.
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Daniela Papi
PEPY Tours
Daniela, I'm really glad to see this discussion happening. I wonder a lot also about the impact of volunteers on the area they want to help. I think that it's hard to make a blanket statement about voluntourism being good or bad, but rather that there are ways of doing it, and certain types of volunteer work, that are positive and ways that are negative.
I think that what makes PEPY so positive is that they focus on teaching -- the environmental lessons in schools are awesome. I remember, as a kid, many of the visits to my elementary school by special speakers, volunteer organizations, the police explaining about child abduction and they ways they use dogs to find missing people, etc. The visits (and, ultimately, the lessons taught) stuck out in my mind because of the new people who were investing in my health, education, and safety.
On my trip, I could tell that these rural Cambodian kids were having the same experience. In the enviro lessons that we taught, the kids knew SO MANY of the answers to the questions we were asking -- because kids from the other class who already had the lesson had told THE WHOLE SCHOOL what the foreigners were talking about. It's an exciting opportunity for both students and volunteers to learn about each other, and the lessons STICK.
It's often FEELS more rewarding to paint a fence or mural on a wall and SEE the immediate impact that you've made, but where voluntourism really makes a difference is by investing in culturally sensitive education. Besides, doing manual labor projects actually takes jobs AWAY from the local community, who could do the job more skillfully than volunteers anyway! Sharing information about the environment etc. may not leave volunteers walking away with the sense that they've DONE something good for a community, but the ideas ultimately last a lot longer than the coat of paint.
Having first joined PEPY as a volunteer in March 2007, I immediately signed up for another PEPY experience in March 2008, a trip that finished just 1 week ago. Both trips provided such amazing learning experiences at a completely grassroots level; and never before have I been in touch with so many like minded individuals who are so on the ball about issues including development and sustainability, the environment and social affairs. PEPY is doing great work for both rural education and responsible tourism throughout Cambodia, and I will most definitely continue to support all of their future endeavours. Go PEPY!! :)
I was first introduced to PEPY at the Adventure Travel World Summit in Whistler, Canada last October. It was a pleasure. How refreshing Daniela (founder of PEPY) was, candidly sharing how important is it to not only celebrate your successes, but also accept your failures. She also stressed the importance of listening to local communities; there is almost always a difference between what the outsider recognizes as a need, and what the insider community views as a necessity. There are certainly a lot of “best-intentions” people and organizations within the industry – which is something we should celebrate – but finding those that are truly effective, is much more difficult. The company I work for, Adventure Life, has been dedicated to giving back to the local communities and environments where we send our travelers, since we began in 1999. And finding organizations and projects to support that go beyond simply good-intentions, has taken a lot of time, research and trial and error. I can certainly appreciate PEPY’s successes and struggles. There is also a frequent pressure (both internal and external) to try and “save the world,” if you will. Keeping yourself, your project and your funds focused is a struggle – and PEPY is certainly taking a great path out of this struggle.
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Travel well.
Beth Conway
Adventure Life
www.Adventure-Life.com
Thank you so much for the post, Beth! I appreciate what you said about finding organizations to support that are doing "good", and how it is a trial end error process. That is so important to keep in mind. All too often, reading about or hearing about an organization puts it in a great light, and makes it easy to want to invest. I am glad that you seem to agree that, once we do though, it is so important to follow up on that investment and ensure that the funding is indeed supporting positive changes. It is difficult when you put a partner on your site, promote their work, and then learn that corruption or mismanagement means their work is no longer something you want to support. Sadly, I often see organizations and people who choose to turn a blind eye to that, as I have surely done in the past, thinking "oh, that must be wrong, they couldn't have done that." and continuing to promote the work for fear of looking like a previous mistake was made. Instead, if we can dig deeper, help those organizations who have fixable issues recognize the areas where their impact is causing harm, and admitting that the trial end error has caused the need to walk away from some projects, it will be better off for the communities involved I believe.
Thanks for writing and many thanks for all you do!
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Daniela Papi
PEPY Founder
www.pepyride.org
My pleasure, Daniela! It is certainly a collaborative effort...
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Travel well.
Beth Conway
Adventure Life
www.Adventure-Life.com
Beth,
It was so interesting to read your comment. I remember going to one of PEPY's partner organizations in Cambodia, RDIC. A tour participant asked Mickey Sampson, the creator of RDIC, what their greatest failure was. Mickey's response: there haven't been many failure, because RDIC has never given up when they found a need that was difficult to address. They explore and sometimes abandon a certain ineffective way of addressing a problem, but RDIC keeps looking for new answers to problems. Each "failure" is a learning process, and one that should be shared so that other orgs can bypass the time it takes to learn that lesson. (RDIC is GREAT at making info available to other orgs!)
I love to see PEPY developing and re-developing their programs as they learn what works and doesn't work in Cambodia. I love that they do Community Rural Assessments to ask the community to envision what they most need, and then take that data to inform their projects. PEPY is great in that it is so small and dynamic that it can adapt relatively quickly to include lessons learned from constructive criticism and other orgs, and in the first few years of PEPY's operation, it's easy to see the ways that the org has grown in its understanding of how to identify and address needs. I hope to see PEPY continue to constantly evaluate and re-evaluate its progress, re-envisioning new solutions that address problems more fully.
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Travel well.
Beth Conway
Adventure Life
www.Adventure-Life.com
Hi Mandy,
I agree with you completely -- the word "failure" in these situations does not quite work, simply because "failing" is usually just a step in the process towards success. Yes -- it is about learning from what doesn't work and addressing problems through a different approach.
Thanks for your comments; your statements specifically about PEPY's enthusiasm and ability to learn and adapt, was exactly why I was so immediately impressed with their company. I'm very interested to learn a little more about RDIC as well - but is sounds like they are doing great things.
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Travel well.
Beth Conway
Adventure Life
www.Adventure-Life.com
double post
Among the MANY things that impress me about PEPY is how thorough they are with all that they do. They have so many innovative programs and strategies that enable them to work on problems such as rural education in such HOLISTIC ways. They don't take short cuts, and are willing to do the extra work when they think it's in the best interest of the communities that they serve.
PEPY also attracts AMAZING people, and that is one of the keys to their sustainability!!! The PEPY staff and other participants on my trip were all inspiring and challenged me to expand my perspective of what my life could be. The people that I met are key in keeping me engaged in PEPY now and in the future, and they are certainly part of the reason why I give back and hope to GO back.
I don't mean to say that PEPY RELIES on the INDIVIDUALS in its staff, although everyone who knows Daniela may disagree :) Great organizations (non-profit or otherwise) aren't great because of 1 or 2 great leaders, they're great because they can sustain their work over long periods of time and have success at achieving their mission (paraphrasing Jim Collins, for any who know his work). I think PEPY's thoroughness in all that it does, the systems and strategies it has developed, will allow other leaders in the future to continue to develop PEPY and add more and more innovations. I don't know if Daniela wants to be in Cambodia for the next 40 years, but I know she wants PEPY to be!!
Keep up the great work - I look forward to seeing where this crazy idea goes!
Chris