A group of people hiking on a trail through a grassy area with tall trees and a mountain in the background.

Welcome Statement

Global Works believes that travel is a vehicle for growth and social change.

We value a culture of inclusion of ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and socioeconomic status – this starts in our home office and extends to the teachings of our staff and program partners around the world.

Global Works strives to be a team and develop accessible programs representative of the many backgrounds and identities of those we seek to serve.

A person paints a metal fence with orange paint using a brush, holding a can of paint in the other hand.

At Global Works, we acknowledge that travel is not always accessible or open to all communities. We are actively working to change that and expand opportunities for travel. We are taking steps at Global Works now.

Initiatives

We support our non-profit partner, Wonderfolk (previously called Global Works Community Fund), to address these questions of access. We fully recognize that travel programs, like Global Works, can be primarily limited to those who have access to economic and social privilege. In 2011, we founded Global Works Community Fund (now Wonderfolk), a 501(c)3 organization, in order to address questions of access in our work. What we didn’t realize at the time was that this was our first step towards addressing antiracism and an attempt at creating truly equitable travel.

Today, Wonderfolk is run by a dedicated group of mentors, board members, a youth advisory board, and staff; and the org has a full-fledged mentoring program that focuses on antiracism, equitable practices, and building bridges to multidimensional leadership opportunities for BIPOC youth. To date, these opportunities have been provided for 78 students from Denver, CO and Portland, OR.

We commit to doubling down on ways that we can be a greater funding source for Wonderfolk. We want to enable our Global Works families to help make these transformative and life changing experiences available to more eager and motivated young leaders, regardless of financial background. We invite you today to support Wonderfolk via donation

We seek out, through our School Group Travel programs, more partnerships and work to make travel opportunities accessible for a broader range of school populations – public, private, parochial, charter, urban, rural, etc. – so that Global Works travel experiences reach a diverse population of students.

We partner with organizations that support students from low-income backgrounds and provide scholarships to travel on Global Works programs. Partner organizations are:

We provide educational group travel experiences for young people, school, and university groups who engage in Homestays, Community-led Service Projects, Language Immersion, Adventure, Cultural tourism/sightseeing in locations in South America, Central America, Indigenous Nations, Asia, United States/territories, South Pacific, Western Europe. Specific actions that our programs achieve include, but are not limited to: 

We look to the places closest to us to investigate how we can make necessary change in our offices, our backyards, our neighborhoods, and the communities where we live, learn and play. We donate to and support Cal-Wood Education Center’s Summer and Latino Family Camp programs and we invite you to donate, as well.

We invite conversation. Keep us accountable as we continue to do better. Share your ideas and resources with us at [email protected] and 303-545-2202.