Go Overseas Community News

If you follow our blog here on Go Overseas over the past week, you may have noticed a trend. In the last week, we've published stories focused exclusively on a single topic: building peace through travel.

We chose to devote a chapter of our editorial calendar to peace because, in the era where collecting travel points, city hopping, and country counting has become the norm, we are deeply committed to the kind of travel that goes deeper.

At Go Overseas, we call this "meaningful travel," and our definition encompasses all kinds of travel which generate a lasting positive impact on both the traveler and the host community. Whether it's a student who returns from a semester abroad with a 'second family' from their homestay experience or a gap year traveler who extends their stay to continue important volunteer work in a community, each of these travel experiences is the kind we work tirelessly to create more of in the world.

We believe there is an opportunity start a conversation about travel and peace in the moments where the world briefly turns its short attention span to this important topic. As we've shown in this week's articles, these meaningful travel experiences are important because they have an impact. As travelers we have a responsibility to try and ensure that impact is positive -- hopefully, it improves the quality of the world by making it a more peaceful place to be.

Our commitment to peace-building, meaningful travel isn't arbitrary; it comes from our own experiences in the world. Here are three stories from within the Go Overseas family that remind us how travel is a unique opportunity to build peace.

Tucker Hutchinson, COO

"In 7th grade, I volunteered with a small California-based NGO called Seeds of Learning. They send volunteers (middle schoolers, high schoolers, families) to El Salvador to build schools. Their general fundraising activities also help support supplies and staff at those schools year round."

"In the 1990s, the U.S. government supported the repressive government in El Salvador (including supplying weapons the government used to attack and kill thousands of revolutionaries). The village we were building in had a town hall covered in a huge mural that depicted the American involvement in that war. It was a sobering sight to see as a young person."

"Governments, including our own, are not always 'just...' Nevertheless, individuals have the ability to represent their country and people however they choose. I hope our time there volunteering meant something to the local Salvadorans, or at the very least showed that Americans are more than the actions of our government past and present. When my mom passed away all donations went to Seeds of Learning. They put a plaque in her name on the school we'd built together back in 7th grade:"

Tucker's story shows an example of how long-lasting our impact can be as a traveler; the plaque in honor of his mom is an indelible reminder that we can build peace on an individual level. Learn more about opportunities to build peace through physical building projects:

• Habitat for Humanity does work worldwide.
• Build Abroad offers opportunities in Costa Rica, Nepal, and Thailand, among others.
• IVHQ offers worldwide building projects.

Maya Tobias, VP of Marketing and Growth

"I lived and worked as a volunteer teacher in Israel the year after I graduated from college. In a country that feels like it’s constantly on the brink of war, peace is a very heavy word."

"My roommate Rachel was an artist. She did a collaborative painting project where she would set up a blank canvas on the street and invite strangers to paint whatever they wanted. I joined her on many of these outings. We did paintings in the Old City of Jerusalem, in a refugee shelter, and on the streets of Tel Aviv."

"I’m not gonna lie, it didn’t always end well. Sometimes we had to quickly put away our paints and canvas because we were in uncomfortable situations. But for the most part, the project worked. It gave Rachel and I an opportunity to engage with people from all different backgrounds and gave different people the opportunity to unleash their creativity and work together on a communal project."

Through art, Maya experienced a war-torn region and ways to connect and build peace. Dive deeper into art programs on Go Overseas:

• Study Art Abroad
• Art Internships Abroad
• Volunteer Abroad for the Arts

Mitch Gordon, CEO

"I just recently hiked the Abel Tasman Track in New Zealand. It’s a breathtaking ~50-mile multiple day hikes through the jungle and on the side of cliffs overlooking the ocean. There are a number of rustic huts located throughout the trek."

"At the end of each day, we stopped at a hut to eat, recharge and sleep. The huts are a great place to interact with people from all over the world. On multiple days of our trek, there was a group of about 12 students we shared a hut with. They were hiking the trail together, as a group. Almost none of them were from the same country. They were from China, Brazil, Taiwan, South Korea, Denmark, Malaysia, Japan and more. They all used English to communicate and I found the cacophony of different accents to be equal parts interesting and inspiring. These were people who cared about each other and were interested in each other’s cultures."

"After a trip like that, there could be no illusions about the “superiority” of one culture over another. They were learning to have fun with people from different backgrounds and to respect different ideas and ways of looking at the world. They were the perfect representation of why we all travel. After their trip, they’ll return home to their countries and bring back different ideas and, most importantly, a tolerance and understanding of other cultures."

"In my time around this group of students, I found myself filled with hope thinking, “This is what everyone in the world needs: genuine, real interaction with people from different backgrounds. It really can change the world.” That’s the Go Overseas mission!"

Sometimes, we travel to 'get away,' but find that those few fellow travelers we encounter during these experiences teach us lessons anyway. Explore more in our new section called "Tours & Trips," which offers meaningful multi-day tours in a variety of activities all over the world:

• Consider the Burgundy Walking Tour in France.
• Step out on the Romania Hiking Tour.
• Explore on a tour Hiking in Jordan.

Why We Are Inherently on a Mission of Peace

We share these stories and highlight these meaningful travel opportunities so that you can see what we see: the world is full of opportunities to build peace. It can be trekking in New Zealand, building a school in El Salvador, or teaching and living in Israel. Each and every time we travel, we can help build peace.

Our mission at Go Overseas is to empower more people to spend meaningful time overseas. Every day, we work hard to craft content, share programs and travel opportunities, and build technology that makes this meaningful travel accessible.

We believe that a more peaceful world is possible, and travel is one of the most powerful ways we can help accomplish that. We hope you'll join us on our mission, whether it's through your own travels or by creating meaningful travel opportunities for others.

Maybe we’re a little biased, but we believe the Go Overseas website gets a little better every day. Even if we don’t make any functional changes, our users share valuable stories of their overseas experiences at all hours: reviews, interviews, videos, questions, comments, pictures, you name it!

Most days, the team here in Berkeley also improves the site. Usually, these are small tweaks, such as fixing a bug or improving a call to action for our users to respond to. Some months we unveil a whole new section (most recently TEFL Courses) or a new suite of Provider or User features (community interactivity, analytics, content tools, etc). Once in awhile (twice in seven years), we launch a whole new website!

Earlier this month we migrated GoOverseas.com from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8. This is, as I mentioned, effectively launching a new website. It was the first time we’ve upgraded our content management system (CMS) and is the single biggest technical investment we’ve ever made. Drupal is the software that serves as our CMS and is responsible for driving everything our users see and do. The Go Overseas site was built on Drupal 6, the latest version available to us in 2009. It was a great platform for us as we started to grow, but was starting to show its age.

With Drupal 8 nearing completion last year we made the decision to upgrade. It took nine months of intense work to prepare and then migrate the entire website to its new home. Our CTO, Andrew used the analogy of a construction project to explain the scope and complexity of the move: we remodeled our house (GoOverseas.com) in the midst of hosting a giant dinner party (1,000,000 monthly visitors and 6,000+ providers). We had to upgrade the house and all the furniture in it, without disturbing any of those guests. No small feat!

After successfully launching the new ‘back end’ of the site, we celebrated by kidnapping Andrew to Las Vegas for the night, where we forced him to shave his 5-month beard. He decided to get a few tattoos on his own – we had a lot to celebrate.

We invested those thousands of human hours into upgrading to Drupal 8 for two reasons:

1. Drupal 8 is a vastly more powerful platform for us to develop new features on. We’ll be able to do more for our providers and visitors, faster. Look out for lots of new features starting next quarter (and beyond).
2. It’s both more stable and more secure. We’ll always take the long- term view when it comes to the site.

We hope you enjoy the new, improved Go Overseas website, and ask you to forgive us if you see a few seams showing in the upholstery. As always, we’ll continue to work to improve our site, even as we’ve just completed a massive overhaul. Thanks for joining us on the journey so far.

Want to learn more about Drupal? Check out the links below. In short, it’s an enterprise level CMS system that powers websites like UC Berkeley’s and The White House.

• https://www.drupal.com/product/web-content-management
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drupal

A big thanks to our Development team (Andrew, Logan, Lauren, and James) for their incredible work in bringing this project to fruition.

Similar to the foundations of the United States, the field of International Education is based on a foundation of cross-cultural learning, curiosity, and compassion. The President’s executive order, which implements a 90-day ban on citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries, suspends refugee admissions for 120 days, and indefinitely bans Syrian refugees, is antithetical to our very core values as international educators — and as Americans. We stand united with people in the United States and around the world in denouncing the President’s action.

But sometimes words aren't enough. One of our company values at Go Overseas is to Take Action. With more than 1 million monthly visitors, we have a responsibility to do more.

To make our voices — and the voices of travelers and international educations around the country — heard, we have created a petition, which you can sign as an organization or as an individual, to ask Congress to oppose this executive order. We will collect signatures through February 17, 2017. On February 20, we will hand deliver them to a member of Congress in Washington, DC.

We are also donating $5,000 to the ACLU to help them fight against these new policies. We hope you will consider a donation as well.

History is always more easily evaluated in retrospect. We live in a critical moment where we all need to make choices. We hope you will join us and choose to stand up for our values as passionate travelers, international educators, as Americans, and as citizens of the world.