SUSTAINABILITY

How We Run Our Projects

As a company operating in some of the most beautiful and pristine places on Earth, we have a moral duty to ensure that we operate our experiences in a way to preserve the areas we work in.

In addition, we often work with very hospitable local communities, who’s generosity can be taken advantage of by unscrupulous individuals.

For these reasons, we take our responsibility to protect the environment and communities we interact with very seriously.

We plan all of our logistics to minimize waste as much as possible, and to leave minimal traces of our presence. Food is chosen that does not generate mountains of plastic waste, and we provide water from reusable gallon bottles of drinking water, or single use plastic. Many of our projects result in the local environment being left in a better place than how we found it, through, for example the Nepal biogas trip or Thailand Coral Bleaching project.

The local people we work with have been consulted to ensure our presence is welcomed, wanted and will not cause a detrimental effect on the community cohesion, jobs or the local economy. We work in areas that will benefit from small-scale sustainable tourism, without taking away jobs from local people or causing frictions amongst the community. The effects of our presence are regularly reviewed to ensure we are still contributing to a positive change in the community.

The UN Global Goals

Many of our experiences have outcomes that link directly to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the relevant global goals are mentioned in their itineraries.

Even in our experiences where links are not explicitly mentioned, time is taken to ensure that one or more of the UN SDGs is being addressed. This could be in the form of working with host families to provide an income so they can buy essential supplies (no poverty - Goal 1), or trekking in the Himalayas to promote cardio-vascular health (good health & wellbeing - Goal 3).

The links to the Global Goals can act as effective springboards for students to explore specific learning outcomes, or simply to highlight important issues to adults who are joining us for a once in a lifetime experience.

Keeping It Local

Wherever possible we engage with local people to help us run our experiences. This could be in the form of using locally-owned accommodation, or hiring local guides, buying local foods and so on. We are big believers in spending money at the local level in order to bring maximum benefit to the areas we operate in.