Roadmonkey provides new route to volunteering for travellers with a taste for adventure

A new kind of travel operator is putting philanthropy on the map by combining rugged adventure experiences with the deeply gratifying opportunity to get hands-on helping some of the world’s most needful people.

'Positive not passive' travel is how New York Times (NYT) correspondent Paul von Zielbauer, the man behind Roadmonkey Adventure Philanthropy describes this new venture in volunteering.

von Zielbauer has already led two successful trips, saddling up a very small group of cyclists in November 2008 to pedal a 450 mile arc of dramatic scenery through northwest Vietnam, then spending several days building a playground for orphans west of Hanoi.

This was followed by a second trip this July, leading a tour up Mt. Kilimanjaro, the highest point in Africa, and travelling overland toward Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania’s capital, to build a clean-water system and refurbish a number of classrooms at a school for children orphaned by East Africa’s AIDS epidemic.

Adventure philanthropy is not for everyone von Zielbauer acknowledges – “but those who join us know immediately they want to go.

“They are people who are often at a transformative stage in their life –in their mid 20s to mid 40s and frontier-type thinkers,” explains von Zielbauer.

“Our tours bring together like-minded, smart, curious people who get the idea that there is a different way to travel. Through community voluntary work travellers become embedded in and integrated with a new culture; so much so that our clients end up in the homes of the Vietnamese people they work with drinking rice wine with them and getting to know how they live, for example. We describe our trips as ‘small group travel for people who don’t like group travel’. It’s a way to leave behind the bus trips and photo opportunity tours,” he says.

Roadmonkey operates by getting clients to use their social networks to raise 500 to 1000 tax-deductable dollars each towards the cost of the charity project several months before the tour hits the road.

“That way funds can be raised through relatively small value pledges of say $50 or $100 from friends and colleagues.”

It was a similar fundraising approach that got Roadmonkey started just over a year ago. With no budget for PR or marketing von Zielbauer undertook a word of mouth campaign using his own social network.

The first fundraiser held in New York and Washington, peopled by his NYT colleague’s alumni from Stanford, Harvard and Yale raised $1500. Though von Zielbauer has improved his fundraising performance since, he says it does not come naturally, having spent his professional life asking questions and remaining publicly neutral on issues instead of advocating one side – an essential component to effective fundraising. “It has been the biggest challenge I have had to face yet,” says the one-time Iraqi war correspondent, who has negotiated his way out of various culturally risky situations on his extensive travels.

And the biggest pleasure? “That has to be the depth and endurance of the feeling that doing good delivers. Though I knew it would be a gratifying feeling I wasn’t prepared for how deep that feeling would be and how long it stays with you.”

The next step for von Zielbauer is to put the for-profit organisation on a sustainable footing. He is working on a business plan that will chart a path to growth that will not compromise the intimate nature of the small tour experience; groups are no more than 10-strong.

The masterplan is for Roadmonkey to create a foundation through which it could identify charities to partner with, that would allow donors to support causes through tax-deductable giving and save Roadmonkey the 10%  fees it  currently pays to access this world.

“What would really help along with the obvious start-up capital is some mentoring so I don’t have to re-invent the wheel each time.” Which must be pretty crucial when you run an adventure philanthropy company across the globe.

To contact Paul at Roadmonkey, email Paul at paul@roadmonkey.net or call +1-917-319-8070. You can also Skype at “Roadmonkey” or Twitter Roadmonkey_Inc.