Venture with Impact organizes accommodation, workspace, & volunteer experiences for professionals who live and travel in a country abroad for a month or longer.
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What does it mean to be successful at work? And what does success mean to a company? The answers to both of these questions are evolving, and yet they’re more connected than ever.
Our personal views of being successful at work are shifting away from being able to buy a gold watch and fancy car toward having work-life balance and feeling a sense of purpose at work. In other words, particularly for millennials, we’re not just working for money — we’re working for meaning.
Finding top talent is challenging. Many business leaders are struggling to attract and retain talented employees. Motivating millennial workforces is another obstacle leaders continue to encounter. What’s the solution? Incentive travel rewards employees for meeting performance objectives or recognizes them for years of company loyalty. Businesses who offer travel experiences as a new work-perk are being rewarded with teams that are highly engaged and more satisfied.
We are excited to announce a collaboration with Pivot Journeys, an organization that offers experiences for career growth and development. Both Venture with Impact and Pivot Journeys strongly believe that international travel can have a positive impact on your career, whether you are negotiating your role or trying to figure out what comes next. With that in mind, we are sharing an inspiring post by Pivot Journeys, "How Travel Fuels your Career". So pack your laptop to work and travel inspired by the world around you. Your career will thank you!
Meet Jenna VanLooven. Jenna has never lived abroad, and excited to finally get an opportunity to do so. Jenna is lucky enough to have a job that allows her to work from anywhere with internet, so she didn't have to convince her boss to work remotely! She is finally at a point in her life that is allowing her to participate in this wonderful volunteer experience. Jenna is most excited to learn something new and give back to the community. Continue reading to learn more about Jenna!
Meet Ali Al Herz. She is a Saudi Arabia native who went to school in the United States and loves to travel. Ali is passionate about helping people and looking forward to putting her engineering skills and knowledge to use by helping others. She is currently looking for a new job, and thought this would be the perfect opportunity while waiting! Continue reading to learn more about Ali.
You are about to embark on an incredible adventure. Venture with Impact can be just as valuable for your employer as it is for you. We want to help you convince them with these tips. Once you've thought through your pitch, we recommend creating a written business case and communicating your case
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!
