Everyone deserves the chance to travel. Yet, all too often, seeing the world is a privilege reserved for the global elite. At Elevate Destinations, we bridge the divide. Our goal is to connect local youths to their own environments, as travelers and as stewards.
Through our innovative Buy a Trip, Give a Trip model, your trip purchase creates fun, new travel opportunities for local kids. For the first time, they experience nearby natural and cultural wonders. They see the sites, have fun, and make the kind of travel memories that we take for granted.
Here’s just one example of Buy a Trip, Give a Trip in action:
A select group of three top-performing students from the Make A Difference Now Foundation. They went with one local staff member and one international staff member.
The Trip:
A five-day journey to Lake Victoria, with a focus on learning and higher education planning.
The Details:
The Lake Victoria trip was all about learning, nature, and culture. Students got to learn about the local culture near Mwanza, sail on the lake, visit a local university, and go on a one-day educational safari. The journey was long, as it takes two full days of travel just to get there, but well worth it!
Firsts:
- Seeing new parts of Tanzania, such as Mwanza, Singida and Msoma
- Encountering tribal people such as the Sukuma culture
- Beholding the vast expanse of Lake Victoria and learning its role in Tanzanian life
Quotes from the road:
“Educational trips have different importance to students like me. They allow students to get knowledge, know how different societies live, and meet different cultures of the people of Tanzania. We also learn more practically through educational trips. It helps students to know what school to go to for advanced level so they can enter into the career they want. For example, students who want to be engineers should study at St. Augustine University of Tanzania (SAUT) which we visited outside of Mwanza this month. Also, educational trips make students study hard to get the opportunity to have trips.”
– Benny
“The importance of an educational trip is to improve a person’s knowledge. Trips improve our knowledge like the history in the Sukuma Museum. The trip helps all of us in developing our brains.”
– Innocent
Partner Organization:
Make a Difference Now (MAD) is on a mission to support quality educational opportunities for vulnerable children and youth in developing countries, primarily in Tanzania and India. As a local charity, the goal is to raise funds to send the children to high quality schools. Since its inception in 2008, MAD has developed a unique model of care. Upending the status quo of accepting a large number of children but only providing the basic necessities, MAD seeks to concentrate resources on a smaller number of children with quality care.
