PEPY looks to partner with local and socially responsible organizations when operating our educational tours. We pick our hotels, restaurants, tour operators, and partner organizations with care and look for long-term relationships with these groups that can improve our collective impact on Cambodia. By learning from and sharing our own lessons learned with our partners and contractors, together we can mitigate the pressure tourism is putting on Cambodia’s environment and culture.

The "Center for Global Engagement" states in this website below that "It seems to us that the more critical voices you can add to a worldview that still drives you firmly in the direction of doing something, the better suited to creating change over your lifetime you'll be."  I couldn't agree with them more.

I think it is important for those of us working in development and tourism to remind ourselves of the vast possibilities for negative impact we have in both fields and to constantly work to mitigate that negative impact.  If we avoid reading the criticisms about the arenas in which we work, we will not know what to avoid nor how to distinguish ourselves from those critics.  We are also likely to learn and be reminded of things we could do better. 

Here are some critical views on development agencies and volunteering: https://www.justmeans.com/allthings/128/Top-Five-Critiques-of-Develo...

They are worth reading, and I passed them on to a group of friends in the travel industry.  Here was our subsequent conversation:

This month's edition of Long Island City Magazine features an article by Wynne Boelt, who offers a critical perspective on the growing business of voluntourism. It profiles PEPY as an example of a responsible tour operator and includes some thoughtful commentary on voluntourism from past participant and intern Adam Vaught. We've included the full text of the article here - click read more to see it all!

Give-away, Get-away
by Wynne Boelt

This article was originally published in the May edition of Long Island City Magazine.

The waves are calm, the sun is refreshing, the beach is stunning
– but the true beauty of this vacation is in the smiles we exchange.

Colleen Meigher, a school psychologist in Boston, traveled to the Dominican Republic as a "voluntourist" with Orphanage Outreach, a group that works with abandoned and otherwise disadvantaged children. As part of the tourist experience, volunteers saw the island countryside and learned about Dominican culture. While volunteering, Meigher discovered a rare joy as she provided the orphans with help in English, Spanish and math, and engaged them in games and activities.

Hello PEPY People!

We need your help!

We are very excited to be entrants in the National Geographic Ashoka's Changemakers Geotourism Challenge: Celebrating Places, Changing Lives. This is a global competition to recognize innovators in geotourism, defined as tourism that sustains or enhances the geographical character of the place being visited - its environment, culture, aesthetics, heritage, and the well-being of its residents. Ashoka has created this competition so that it awards $5,000 to the entrant with the highest number of on-line comments and votes, but perhaps the more exciting part about this is the feedback and exposure PEPY can get from critical eyes in the responsible tourism world.

The more comments that we have on our page, the more exposure we will get through this site, and the more discussions will be spurred which will help us improve the impact of our programs here in Cambodia. If you have a few minutes, please visit our page and write a few sentences about what PEPY means to you or has done for you – or what you've seen PEPY do for Cambodia. You could tell a story, make a suggestion to PEPY, talk about sustainable tourism, or put anything you want to say about your PEPY experience out there for the world to see!