Jul
Vietnam 2008: Roadmonkey expedition co-leader Brent Wexler & new semi-friend.
When I launched Roadmonkey last year, some people told me to change the name. “I can’t see CNN or ABC News doing a segment about a company called ‘Roadmonkey’,” one person in the PR business told me.
Well, he turned out to be wrong.
But other people asked, and rightfully so, what “adventure philathropy” was supposed to mean. It’s a long, gangly phrase, after all, that combines two words that are well known on their own but not exactly comfortable when enclosed together in quotation marks.
Adventure philanthropy. It also doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. Yet I named my company after this idea. Why?
Because, for one, I liked the idea of bringing the idea of old-school philanthropy – with its musty image of wealthy people sitting in parlors with fireplaces deciding how to dispense millions of dollars to charity – back to the common woman and man, where it belongs. As Roadmonkey expeditions to Vietnam and Tanzania have proven, anyone can become an adventure philanthropist, if they have the gumption, fortitude and curiosity to get out into the world and get their hands a little dirty.
Also, for-profit adventure travel companies were more or less invented in the 1960s, when no one knew if people would pay you to take them on ass-kicking adventures in foreign lands where – get this – almost no one speaks English. And by spring 2008, when I launched the Roadmonkey website, it was high time to push the adventure travel paradigm to the next level: Adventure philanthropy. I hope that in 20 years the phrase will be as much of a no-brainer as “adventure travel” is now.
Finally, can you think of a shorter word for philanthropy? If I could have, I would have used it. (Adventure Volunteering is even longer.)
But I’m open to suggestions, comments, criticisms, ridicule, derision, verbal threats, encomia and cheeseburgers.
More from the road, which will include Roadmonkey scouting trips to Nicaragua and Peru in July & August, soon.
- Paul
