For the last year or so we have been hugely fortunate and have been lucky enough to have received support from the Change Your World Fund so we thought it was about time we told you a bit about it.
The Change Your World fund is a project of ConserVentures Charitable Organisation and it was established in memory of Australian motorcyclist Alistair Farland, who tragically died in an accident while on his first overland adventure, riding from Alaska to Ushuaia. Alistair was born in 1990 so he was roughly our age. He was a firm believer that exploration has the power to change things, and we agree. Exploration challenges stereotypes. It means you come face to face with people from different backgrounds and it provides more opportunities for learning about others and yourself than it is given credit for.
We, too, believe that more people our age need to get involved with exploration and adventure, which hold the key to combatting many of the issues we face as a global society. We didn’t know Alistair but having read through his blog it’s clear we had many such shared beliefs. He wrote that he believes pushing yourself out of your comfort zone is the key to life – we definitely agree with that one too but what struck us most when reading through his blog is this sentence:
“This trip is forcing me to believe that people are inherently good and each border merely separates families who want better for their children than for themselves.”
That, for us, is the most important thing about travel. It does exactly that. It forces you to realise how truly ridiculous some of the constructs that govern modern life are. It seems to us that Alistair came to exactly the same conclusions that we did. He learnt, through getting out there and experiencing it for himself, that no matter where your motorbike takes you, the world is a good place full of great people. The more people we can get to jump out of the hamster wheel of modern life and experience that for themselves the better our global society will be. We believe that adventure travel and exploration is the cure to bigotry, prejudice and xenophobia – it provides understanding and connects people like nothing else – it is the key to a better world.
We were awarded the Change Your World Fund grant to produce our new book “Our Ridiculous World (Trip)” in 2019 by Roseann and Jonathan Hanson, cofounders of ConserVentures and Overland Expo. The intention of the book is to inspire you to go out and explore the world with the same level of enthusiasm and curiosity as Alistair had and to discover for yourself what Alistair had learnt. We hope it will!
Without the help of Roseann and Jonathan Hanson and the Change Your World Fund, the book would still just be an idea. Their help and advice in the editing and production of the book was invaluable. Thank you both! The support of the Change Your World Fund has enabled us to donate £1 from every sale of the paperback of the book to Unseen UK. We hope that this donation is able to help Unseen change the world for survivors of modern slavery and enable them to live happy, free lives.
If you’d like to learn more about the Change Your World Fund visit: http://www.conserventures.org/change-your-world-fund
To read more about and pre-order the book we’ve put together with the Change Your World Fund visit: https://armchairadventurefestival.com/product/our-ridiculous-world-trip-book-pre-order/
Post on the board