Archive for the ‘Challenges’ Category

Inside/Out: Humanitourism Adventures

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

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The other day I received a comment on the blog from Zoe Katsulos, the wonderful leader of Inside/Out, a program similar to SalaamGarage.  Like SalaamGarage, Inside/Out hosts organized trips throughout the year to various regions of the world.  During these voyages, the participating travelers work together on a collaborative service project that is particularly relevant to the region at hand.

Meet Zoe: zoe-katsulos

Here what Zoe says about Inside/Out’s mission:

inside/out provides life changing travel experiences for people who want to make a difference in the world. Our trips are designed around opportunities to do humanitarian volunteer work on meaningful international projects and are combined with sustainable eco-adventure travel in the local area of the project and people. These Humanitourism™ trips are designed to create longer-term relationships between communities and travelers.

I love how they sum up their mission, and I LOVE their term, Humanitourism.  It couldn’t be more spot-on! 

As we speak, Inside/Out is leading an animal welfare mission in Greece, where they are working with the local homeless dog population.  Some of their projects during this endeavor include installing permanent feeding stations for the animals, and also preparing some dogs to be adopted into homes.  They are very excited about this project (rightfully so! and so I’m sure are the dogs they are helping! :-) )greek-dogs

If this animal welfare mission is something that is right up your alley, don’t fret: they’ve had such great responses to this trip that they are planning another one for next year!!  So you can follow along with this year’s trip, learn all you can, get pumped up, and take part next year!  Pretty great, huh?  You can follow along with them on Twitter, Facebook, and by emailing Zoe to sign up for the Inside/Out newsletter (mail.insideout@gmail.com).

I get so excited learning about these various organizations that are out there, welcoming service as a part of travel, and am so happy that through Enchanting Challenge, we can help get the word out and connect volunteers to the service trip of their dreams…Tomorrow, there will be a post about Inside/Out’s summer trip to Africa, for which they are still openings!  Keep your eyes peeled! :-)

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Posted in Animals, Challenges, Children, Community Volunteering, Service, Service Abroad, socially responsible travel | No Comments »

A Message of Hope from Young Pakistanis

Thursday, May 28th, 2009

Last Monday I read a news story in the New York Times that I have not been able to stop thinking about.  The story is called, “Young Pakistanis Take One Problem Into Their Own Hands,” and it is about a wonderful group of young people in Lahore, Pakistan who gather every Sunday to pick up trash in their city’s public places.  The trash-pickers were organized by a group of teens and young twenty-something’s that are frustrated by the prevailing sentiment that all is lost.  These youngsters refuse to believe that all is lost, and they are starting to set a new tone by showing that one visible problem that bothers everyone, TRASH, can be taken care of by a small collective movement.  This they hope will help show people that other problems can too be solved with collective action.

Shoaib Ahmed, one of the founders of the trash collecting movers and shakers
 
Shoaib Ahmed, one of the founders of the trash collecting movers and shakers

 

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These young people are defying a suffocating sentiment in Pakistan, and despite huge obstacles, they are changing the way people think and behave.  And they couldn’t be doing it at a more important time.  For the past few years, news of increasing violence and Taliban insurgencies have been discoloring poor Pakistan.  Then, 2 weeks ago, Swat Valley was evacuated, leaving so many without homes, missing family, and desperately vulnerable to violence, illness, and poverty.  Yesterday, a suicide bomb rocked Lahore, a city that has remained proudly seperate from the violence sweeping through the border and tribal regions, and also the city where the trash collecting young people hail from.  And, today, news reached the world of another bomb shaking up Pakistan, this one in Peshawar.  Pakistan really needs a ray of hope to remind them of the potential power they have as a people to restore peace, and these young trash collectors are starting the movement…My heart is with them and I know your’s is too!!!  Join their Facebook group here and start helping spread the word, spread the movement.

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Posted in Challenges, Community Volunteering, Service | No Comments »

My First Challenge; My First Task

Monday, April 6th, 2009

As I mentioned in my last post, the time has come to log onto Enchanting Challenge and create your personal Challenge!!! 

My first Challenge:

Help promote ECOTOURISM

My first task:

Interview an ecologically-friendly hotel in my area and publish the interview on Ecotrotters.com

What will the task involve?

The Interview will involve meeting with the Casa Calma (the eco hotel in Buenos Aires) management with the Enchanting Challenge team here in Buenos Aires.  We will ask the Casa Calma questions about why they chose to take an eco-friendly approach, and how it has affected their business.  We will then go through our “Environmental Checklist,” a document prepared by Caitlin, our Enchanting Challenge eco-guru.  The checklist is simply a list of questions that checks how environmentally-friendly a hotel is in a variety of areas.  The checklist covers the following areas:

  • The Site (i.e., the surrounding area)
  • The Water
  • The Energy
  • Materials
  • Operation
  • Lighting
  • Education
  • Food/Restaurant

Each of those areas has a few pointers about what can be done in each area to maximize the hotel’s positive environmental impact.  You will be able to see the checklist in its entirety after the interview at Ecotrotters.com!

the reservation desk at Casa Calma

the reservation desk at Casa Calma

 How can this task help my Challenge?

–By facilitating eco-travel to Buenos Aires–

Ecotrotters is a popular website with green-thumbed travelers.  And if any Ecotrotters visit the site before coming to Buenos Aires, perhaps this interview could help promote a green vacation in the Argentine capital!! 

–By varifying ¨green¨ claims–

A lot of places label themselves as green.  We at Enchanting Challenge are so so happy for this environmental explosion, but we want to make sure that places that label themselves green really are green.  In many ways, this checklist is an attempt to varify environmental claims.

–By spreading the idea of ecotourism– 

This task is an attempt to allow other Challengers to promote ecotrousim.  After this interview, the Challenge team in Buenos Aires will upload the interview AND a downloadable version of the checklist to Ecotrotters.com.  That way, anyone else who is interested in interviewing a hotel in their region can simply log onto Ecotrotters.com, download the pdf, go through the checklist with a hotel near them, and upload the results back onto the site!  Together, we can facilitate eco-travel to all our own regions…And then to regions that we travel to!!  Together, we can collect ecotourism information on handfuls and handfuls of region.  Together, we can span the globe.  Remember, micro-action makes macro-change!!!

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Posted in Challenges, socially responsible travel | No Comments »

The Personal Challenge

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009

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As I mentioned in my last post, the Enchanting Challenge website is being updated so that all members can add their personal Challenges to their profiles, which will allow users to more easily connect with other Enchanting Challenge members with like-minded goals!  Let me explain in further detail.

The Challenge is the core of the Enchanting Challenge website.  It is what defines your personal efforts to help make the world a better place, and thus gives the website the depth of its mission: to connect people to better facilitate positive change.

Currently, the Enchanting Challenge developers are putting the final touches on the programming, and the site will be ready for your Challenges so soon!  Here is what you should do to enter them:

To begin uploading your Challenge, start by visiting the profile section of the site.  Once you have created a user-name and a password, you can visit your profile section.  Underneath the “Basic Information” and “Contact Information,” there is a section entitled “Enchanting Information.”  Under that heading, click on “Participate Now,” the text to the right of the Challenges subheading.

Now you can begin to enter your Challenge and be an active member of the Enchanting Challenge community!

Here are the steps to fully completing your Challenge upload:

1) Enter your Challenge’s title.  This can be anything you want, but should give context as to the theme of your actual goal.

2) Fill out the Objective and Description of your Challenge.  Under the “Objective” heading, state your Challenge by composing a sentence that explains the global intent of your action.  For example, “I aim to assist the local food movement.”  Then, underneath the “Description” section, add the specific aims of this goal, which are the different parts of it that need to be completed for the whole of the Challenge to be fulfilled.

3) Now it is time for the TASKS.  The tasks are a crucial element of the Challenge, as they are the specific goals that together complete the Challenge.  Once you finish writing the “Description,” you will be brought to a page that asks you to list the specific goals this Challenge entails.  For example, if my Challenge is to join to the local food movement, then perhaps one of my tasks could be to buy a CSA share and another could be to volunteer during one of my vacation weeks on a WWOOF farm.  After you write your tasks, fill in their expiration dates, which will be recorded in your Challenge calendar.  The system will check up on the status of expired tasks, making sure you completed them or asking if you need an extension, all to make sure the path to your Challenge is organized and coming along smoothly.

You’re done!!  Once you have uploaded your Challenges and tasks, other members can find you and ask to be invited to join your Challenge!  You and your Challenges will be a crucial part of the Enchanting Challenge community.

Follow us on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/EnChallenge !

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Ecotourism Scavenger Hunt!!

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

To continue in the Ecotrotters theme of spreading the word about ecotourism, we at Enchanting Challenge have decided to take up our toolboxes and join in the hunt for eco-hotels and eco-destinations.

The Enchanting Challenge team has created an ecological checklist, put together by our LEED-certified, on-staff eco-guru, Caitlin Cunningham (follow her on Twitter at cacunnin)!  The checklist is amazing and provides a really fair over-view of a hotel’s environmental level.  Moreover, the point of the checklist is not to point fingers at those hotels that are not the greenest they could be.  Rather, it is an attempt to really scrutinize hotels that have already labeled themselves as ecologically-inclined, and then help them to get even more ecologically-inclined, as the checklist is followed up with a list of pointers on how to easily get greener!  Pretty great, huh?

The Enchanting Challenge team will take this super-star checklist and perform our own interview of an eco-hotel close to us– the Casa Calma hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina (of course we will be led by our eco-guru, Caitlin!).  The Casa Calma is a beautiful hotel/spa in downtown Buenos Aires that embraces an organic mission of health, wellness, and balance with nature.  It is wrapped in a beautiful vertical garden that not only keeps the hotel blanketed in aesthetic beauty and good scents, but also works to limit artificial temperature control (and the massive  amount of energy it consumes!), as it keeps out the heat in the summer and keeps the heat in during the winter.  The hotel’s spa offers countless organic health treatments, and the hotel’s restaurant offers delicious and healthy organic cuisine.  It certainly seems like a holistic and healing refuge inside of the city…

We Challengers here in Buenos Aires will take this checklist and meet with employees of the hotel.  We will go through the checklist items with the hotel management, discussing things such as their lightbulb efficiency, window efficiency, natural light efficiency, etc.  Then we will work together with Ecotrotters to write a review about the Casa Calma’s green efforts!!!  Together with Ecotrotters, we will spread the word about how to take a green journey through Buenos Aires.  It is a tiny effort at spreading the word about ecotourism, but if all Challengers take efforts such as these at hotels near them, well, it could be a butterfly-effect of ecotourism.

Which brings me to my next very important point (VIP!).  Tonight at midnight, the Enchanting Challenge website will be updated so that members can upload their Challenges!!!  What does this mean, you may ask?  Well, let me explain!

The Challenge is the heart of Enchanting Challenge.  It allows members to describe their actions that are helping the world, and to unite with fellow Challengers who are interested and/or involved in similar challenges.  No Challenge is too big or small to be listed.  That is why I told you about my personal challenge of helping to spread ecotourism.  My action is small, but if others follow suit, we can have a giant collective action.  So join Enchanting Challenge today, and set up your Challenges!!!

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Posted in Challenges, Environment | No Comments »