Explorate
Organization Details
Explorate is a social enterprise that fosters global citizenship and helps individuals realize their agency and capacity to make a tangible difference in global challenges by making international volunteering more accessible.
Impact Story
According to NPR, approximately 1.6 million people volunteer abroad a year. While there are ample opportunities, finding a credible, safe, affordable, and impactful program remains challenging. Many people are deterred by the gap between expectation and reality throughout the journey and give up on their drive to engage globally. Existing international volunteering platforms offer expensive experiences without a clear emphasis on impact. While such programs provide monetary support to NGOs, the money is often used to enhance volunteering experiences rather than effectively addressing the community’s real needs. The conflict of interests with revenue streams for NGOs not only disrupts the equal distribution of decision-making power to all stakeholders but also contradicts its very own purpose of alleviating poverty. As volunteering becomes tourism, the system of “helping” is incentivized to stay. Due to the lack of emphasis on impact, both volunteers and local communities fail to perceive the impact.
We provide online resources and community-building as well as in-person expeditions. For volunteers, that means more equal access to experiential learning opportunities that help to broaden their worldviews and provide them opportunities to explore and individuate in the important stages of their developmental process. For NGOs around the world, our platform provides more access to talents and a chance to broaden their worldview as well. Only 55% of nonprofits today actively measure volunteer impact as a key performance indicator. We will use our community to provide data support for NGOs. Ethical volunteering programs bring alternative income to the local community and facilitate cultural exchange that ignites learnings for both parties. With mutual benefit, our commitment to ethical international volunteering would enable a world where diversity and inclusion efforts can be included as part of education.
Diverse Social Enterprise
The TRANSFORM Support Hub is committed to accelerating diverse owned and led enterprises to build more equitable and resilient supply chains.