I had long wanted to hike in Patagonia. But it was a long way from the San Francisco Bay Area, it required two days of travel to reach this iconic hiking destination and my personal journey there was complicated by much more than distance. For many years, I thought that the San Francisco Bay Area…
Conservation Volunteers International Program: The name really does not easily roll off the tongue. It is way too long. What were our founders thinking ten years ago when they chose a name for our nonprofit? It is not easy to come up with a new name. A name needs to be unique and memorable. They…
Would you read ConservationVIP’s impact report if I told you that it uses the word “sex” multiple times?
![A [Volunteer] Day in the Life](https://conservationvip.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/yosemite-960x339-1-300x106.jpg)
It was September, 2009. My wife and I learned about ConservationVIP® from a family member and we were encouraged to check out the trip to Yosemite National Park. Upon learning more details from the ConservationVIP® website and through REI Adventures, we signed up to join them. Having experienced the value of volunteering locally and being…
Some things just “say” Galapagos. Darwin. The blue-footed booby. Marine iguana. Tortoise. Darwin’s finches. I’d heard the words before, but now I was about to see them. Here I was, shoe-horned into a small plane approaching Isla Isabela, the outermost inhabited island on the Galapagos Volunteer Trip, with about a dozen Conservation Volunteers International Program…
Have you ever been camping or hiking and thought – darn, I really should have brought those extra socks, or maybe a hat, or maybe a blanket; perhaps, you needed a rope for your tent or someone to chase away a raccoon in the night. Or, you may have even found yourself as the last…