Venture with Impact organizes accommodation, workspace, & volunteer experiences for professionals who live and travel in a country abroad for a month or longer.
Meet Josie Santiago. Josie is a program associate and has a job that allows her to work remotely. Part of her job includes sending young people to live abroad. By immersing herself in this experience, she is able to learn more what it's like for her students! Continue reading to find our more about Josie
"Vive Peru is a nonprofit organization dedicated to fostering understanding of Latin American and Peruvian culture and providing much-needed aid to Peruvian communities. We work to promote cultural understanding and implement innovative and self-sustainable programs in the areas of health, education, social work and engineering."
Meet Jesse Olsen. A 32 year old entrepreneur, CEO and founder of Jump Rope Inc. - an EdTech Company. Jesse has a knack for travel, but this will be his first time volunteering abroad. Looking to escape the New England winter, Jesse is most excited to meet new people and make new friends, all while brushing up on his Spanish. Continue reading to find out more about Jesse!
Daniel is a 27 year old who was looking to shake up his engineering career. With his wife by his side, Daniel & Kayla will be living and volunteering abroad in Trujillo, Peru. Daniel will be working with both Moche and Earth Peru. A few things Daniel will be helping with include engineering of building with reusable materials (such as building a kindergarten out of plastic water bottles), helping form a technical plan for the captation box of a water system, & installing solar panels in elementary schools. Continue reading to learn more about Daniel and why he put in his two weeks notice to make a difference and join Venture With Impact.
Kayla McMullen is a 27 year old physician recruitment coordinator about to start on an adventure of a lifetime alongside her husband Daniel. This will be Kayla's first time living abroad. She will be volunteering with Vive Peru in Trujillo, Peru. Here, she will do a hospital rotation which will include observing clinical procedures and coordinating community events and activities. Kayla will also be helping Vive Peru with public health outreach where she will do home visits to assist with healthy habits, visit families, evaluate home conditions (kitchen hygiene, animals, portable water) and answering questions that families may have. Continue reading to learn more about Kayla and why she decided to pursue Venture With Impact.
As a Venture with Impact-er, you will shape your own destiny. We’re just here to make the ride a little bit easier and a lot more fun. Here’s what an average week might look like for our participants joining the Peruvian pilot program in Trujillo this winter.
Forget Monday Monday: at Venture with Impact it’s Monday Funday!
Most of the group works a hard 8 hour day on their laptops at home or in the number of cafes dotting Trujillo’s Plaza de Armas.
Dan and Lila have Mondays off, and they’ve arranged to spend all eight Mondays of the program teaching English at a public school in Alto Trujillo through Espaanglisch’s Little English Program.
Another day at the office! Except today’s office is the large beachside Otra Cosa café in Huanchaco, twenty minutes from Trujillo.
A few participants grab tamales by the national university’s teeming campus for lunch.
Uri and Meg work standard hours of 8 am to 4 pm each day for their jobs as recruitment managers in the San Francisco Bay Area. They’ve signed up to volunteer with Earth Peru, a local environmental agency. Today they’re taking a break from installing solar panels in schools throughout Trujillo, and are joining local volunteers for a massive beach clean-up twenty miles north of the city along some of Peru’s most pristine coastline.
The two VWImpact-ers make it back to Trujillo just in time to meet the rest of the group as they wrap up the evening with local red grape wine tasting during a history lesson on Peruvian independence at Cafe Dezona Deza in downtown Trujillo.
Early bird surfing is in season in January! We’re catching waves by 7:30 and back online by 9 am. Most of the group frees up their afternoon for a 3 pm cultural tour of the city by a guest lecturer from the University of Trujillo’s architecture department.
Solo-seeking Han is not down for the group fun today. He’s applying his educational background in finance to volunteer at SKIP Wednesdays and Saturdays. At SKIP’s office in Trujillo, Han works with local accountants to arrange micro-financing and crediting options for Peruvian farmers.
That night the full crew of 20 Impacters and 2 VWI staff gather in one of Trujillo’s "Huariques" or small local Peruvian eateries. Participants share large fuentes of ceviche mixto and bottles of the local Cusqueña beer. At our weekly Huarique meetup, we discuss how everyone’s volunteer projects are going, what to prepare for the optional upcoming weekend trip, and take time to hash out any concerns our Impacters have about work, social life, or anything else on our minds.
While most of the crew is using this Thursday as a work day and splitting their professional time between their wifi-connected apartments and the VWI lounge, Ethan is assisting veterinarians at a local animal shelter by bathing, feeding and playing with a new litter of puppies as well as administering vaccines to newly registered animals.
Although the majority of VWI participants work remotely from their jobs back home, Ethan, Krista, and Juan have decided to take the full two months to volunteer and travel. Krista is a freelance photographer and has volunteered part of her time to visit the sites of many of Venture with Impact’s partner nonprofits to take photos. Juan spends his mornings at Huanchaco beach teaching swimming lessons and his afternoons planning and implementing public health workshops with Vive Perú. Working with Vive Perú, Juan has found that one of the local communities is not thoroughly sanitizing their water. This Friday Juan is holding a workshop for families about the importance of using clean water, and methods for purifying their water.
The weekend is here! Almost all participants leave early Saturday morning for the planned but optional 4 hour trip to Huamachuco, in the Sierra of Perú. Upon arrival half the group decides to hike 8 km to the ancient site of Marcahuamachuco with a local guide, while the remainder of the group spends the afternoon in the nearby public hot springs. Everyone meets up later that night for Pisco Sours, the national cocktail and canchas (corn nuts). A few people taste fried cuy (guinea pig!), which is popular in the sierra region around Huamachuco.
After a night in a local hospedaje, VWI participants explore the local market in the morning sipping quinoa from a cup that was sold to them by a street vendor. The group catches a bus back to Trujillo in the early afternoon so that they are fresh for another week of work, volunteer and travel!
To me, a Latin American Córdoba. Narrow streets closed in by cement walls. The wooden Spanish balconies and terra cotta roofing provide hints of old world influence.
In the past fifty years the pueblito has developed an economía de uvas. Uvas are grapes and you'll see them in all parts of Cas Cas. The surrounding green and gold mountains and their valleys have become a home to vineyards, in which millions of grape vines are sowed each year. You can buy a kilo of uvas rojas for 2 soles, about 60 cents. The fat juicy grapes are used to make less delicious semi-seco wine.
After a few weeks of foamy mouth-watery Pisco Sours, I had high expectations for this nationally known wine region just two hours from Trujillo, Perú. The festival of uvas was taking place, which was an opportunity to try all of the local wine in the town's small stadium. Semi-seco, which translates to semi-dry, is in fact not dry at all, it is almost unbearably sweet (for a wine). The wine is hardly fermented and sugar is added after the fermentation process. There is an even sweeter wine (the dulce) that is available at all of the bodegas (wine stores). According to the French guy whom I traveled with, the region's seco (dry) wine is worse than the cheapest boxed wine one can find in France. Maybe I was being a bit bougie when I asked at one of the bodegas, "would you compare this to a Cabernet?" The shop owner replied with a confused and somewhat irritated look.
Needless to say the local flavors were somewhat of a let down, but the views made up for it.
In my freshman year of college I entered the business school at Tulane University. In school I always had a strange itch. It was small at first, I felt it when I was required to volunteer at a local elementary school in New Orleans and found that the 10 year-olds I worked had trouble completing their math because they couldn't read the problems.
The itch grew after spending a summer in Chile, where I realized that the Pinochet regime had caused a disparity in the country. This disparity allowed some (including myself) to live in beautifully restored 19th-century accommodation and enjoy some of the best wine in the world, while others squatted in tarp-roofed houses and consumed contaminated water from the ground .
While working with the Pemón indigenous community in Venezuela the following summer I helped a visiting doctor deliver two babies to 13-year old mothers. During one of the births the baby could not pass through the birth canal due to the girl's small hips. When the baby finally passed through it was resuscitated by the doctor. However, the consequences are a life of a severe brain damage in a society with little acceptance and assistance for the mentally ill.
Providing workshops on sex education in the Pemón Indigenous Region of Venezuela
I've attempted to scratch my itch many times, tried to ignore the fact that such great inequalities exist. I think many, like me, assuage the itch with creams, or apply band-aids in attempt to heal these itches, which inevitably return.
Over time I have realized the importance of having a balance between helping myself and helping others.
Joining Teach For America and teaching in economically disadvantaged communities for the past four years has kept this itchy rash from spreading. Knowing that each day when I stepped into my second-grade class I was making even just a small difference.
With my second graders in Brooklyn, NY
At this point in time, I could view my itch as an annoyance. Instead, I've decided to have the perspective that this itch is just a friendly reminder that there is always a way in which I can and should help others and make an impact.
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Check out our post on 5 WAYS VOLUNTEERING ABROAD CAN BENEFIT YOUR CAREER
Founder of Venture with Impact, Ann is an avid traveler, having visited or lived in over 40 countries in 5 continents. Throughout the past eight years, she has had experience founding a non-profit as well as working for several start-ups. In 2008, Ann co-founded the non-profit organization, Swim 4 Success, which provides free swimming lessons to low-income youth in New Orleans
