If you’ve ever thought a volunteer vacation meant paying thousands of dollars to spend several weeks abroad, think again.
Peter recently chatted with Sheryl Kayne, author of Immersion Travel USA: The Best and Most Meaningful Volunteering, Living, and Learning Excursions, to uncover some of her favorite volunteer experiences, both overseas and in our own backyards.
Peter Greenberg: For most Americans their only kind of immersion travel is watching Julia Roberts in Eat, Pray, Love, and that doesn’t go far enough for me.
Sheryl Kayne: I’ll tell you the truth, I was appalled to find out how many people are repeating her trip and going on her mission. Create your own mission and create your own volunteer vacation because then it will be really meaningful for you and the people that you visit.
PG: Think about what you bring to the party in terms of what you do for a living. I’ll give you an example. A couple of years ago I was talking to the president of one of the big hotel chains, and I had this stupid question that came out of my head: “What do you do with all your hotel beds when you’re done with them?” And he goes, “Well, we throw them out.” I asked him how many, and how often, and he told me it was as many as 10,000 every three months. I said, “I’ll take them.”
SK: Get them to right people.
PG: And we got them. We want to thank the Mormon Church and American Airlines which gave us a 747. We pulled out all the seats (which was probably at FAA safety violation) and we jammed beds on the plane. We went down to Argentina, Ecuador and El Salvador. Today, there are a lot of kids now who are sleeping in beds who didn’t have them before. But we didn’t stop there, and this is where I think your book really hits home, because people don’t understand what they can really bring to the party. We went to a big manufacturing firm in Wisconsin which makes, among other things, generators. I said, “I want one, but I want to bring your engineers with us. I want them to be part of the party.” So they came. This place didn’t have any running water and no electricity. Now they have water to drink, electricity to power the lights and beds.
SK: What I tell people is, yes, it’s wonderful to go to Europe; however you can go to Thailand and volunteer with elephants. Or you can volunteer with elephants right here in the United States at the Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tennessee. You can go and visit and work with turtles in Tobago and Trinidad, or you can go to Barnegat Bay in New Jersey and contribute your time, and effort and energy to benefit the turtles right here.
PG: Keep going, I want some more options.
SK: I love everything in volunteer vacations. You can assist with wildlife conservation in South Africa, of course, but you can also assist right in Florida with the Florida panther. There are about 40 Florida panthers left, and I saw one when I was the Everglades. It really grabs you. Once you see an animal out in the wild that has always existed in a place, you realize that you have to protect it and take care of it. There is the Puffin Project in the Gulf of Maine, where the puffin has successfully been reintroduced.
PG: There is another aspect of this that you talk about in your book, whether you go to Tennessee or Thailand, you actually get to immerse yourself in the culture.
SK: That’s right, you learn about things first hand. You become a local. That is what is so wonderful because you eat like them, you sleep like them. Many of these trips do not charge fees, and you simply pay for your transportation just to get there. There is an organization that sponsors trip out to the North Dakota Indian Reservation that is amazing. They have built a community center, an education center, and all of these different buildings because people were living in burnt-out cars. The head of the reservation, Leonard Little Finger, said the most amazing about what we have brought together here is that the table where we sit around and talk is donated from a synagogue in Ohio; the appliances that we cook our meals with were donated by a manufacturer in Tennessee; and the people at this table are from every walk of America.
PG: That is the beauty of travel is that you can have those types of interactions that you could never have home. Yet it is also in your backyard. You don’t have to go to Thailand; you can go to Tennessee.
SK: I was researching for my book Immersion Travel USA which has one chapter on volunteering. I was looking at the books out there that are considered the Bible in the industry, but they’re all about Europe with a few America trips just thrown in. I thought, there’s got to be more. I really want to bring attention to the events here that need people.
PG: There is a group in Minnesota called Global Volunteers which is kind of a misnomer because they do a lot of their work in the USA. I went with them right down Highway 61 in Memphis into the poorest county in America in Mississippi, and we started rebuilding homes. It was an amazing, immersive experience.
SK: They also have a wonderful program in Kentucky where you really become part of the community, and the focus is really on the children. They ask you to bring certain things for the that are kid-oriented like school supplies, books and games. It is really amazing to get in touch one and one, and when you volunteer here in the United States the most wonderful part is that you get to keep the tie. Many people go back year after year after year.
PG: What would you say is the most unusual surprising volunteer vacation that you discovered?
SK: It’s right here in my own backyard in Ashford, Connecticut. I absolutely adore Hole in the Wall Gang, a summer camp founded by Paul Newman.
By Peter Greenberg for Peter Greenberg Worldwide Radio. To hear the full interview, check out the podcast the homepage of PeterGreenberg.com. To listen to our archives, sign up to be a subscriber (the first month is free!).
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