The Beach Bum is honored to be featured in the October-December issue of STRIVE magazine “BeachCorps: Turning Sustainable Travel on Its Head.” STRIVE magazine is published by The Strive Group, an innovation think tank. STRIVE showcases businesses or people who have embraced the theme of positive change, opportunity and evolution. STRIVE tells the story of creative pioneers stepping into uncharted territory. An intentional journey of leadership, discovery and influencing positive change inspired by a national team of contributors. Join the STRIVE innovation revolution.
STRIVE seeks to unleash ideas via first-person accounts of adaptation, evolution, improvement and success are authentically relevant and resonate with an actively engaged audience. Strive focuses on:
- Change-makers sharing transformative ideas
- Innovative business philosophies
- Creative and inspiring visions
- Business cases for positive disruption
- Initiatives that motivate change
- Workforce ingenuity and engagement
- Bridging ideas through collaborative technology
The entire STRIVE issue is focused on issues of community, which is great since BeachCorps exists to empower local community Rotary leaders. Here’s what the intro to the issue says about community:
“The issues facing communities today are complex to the point of bewildering. While community councils and local, state and federal governments still debate core community issues like infrastructure, education policy and homelessness, increasingly we are becoming aware of our role in, and impact on, the global community. We need to actively engage in respectful civil debate with the intent of mutual betterment to begin to solve these complex global issues.
Creative tension is woven into the fabric of every complex solution that has ever been put forward. It is this tension that forges good ideas into great ones and makes the impossible possible. Community pride is the byproduct of shared struggle and mutual accomplishment. It forms the lattice that results in shared vision.
Local or global, the focus does not matter. What each individual must decide is whether the future will be a product of their positive intentions and engaged effort, or a result of their resistance and/or apathy. It is worth remembering that diamonds are not the only things of value that are formed from heat and pressure.
The BeachCorps concept empowering community leaders is starting to take shape in beautiful Punta Cana, Dominican Republic with the help of the BeachCorps Beach Bum, a.k.a. the Chief Inanimate Object/Recycling Promoter. The Beach Bum, made by a local Haitian artisan, has become a popular local symbol for enjoying sustainable travel. The Bum has starred in “Sustainability Nights” at local bars and restaurants. BeachCorps is a new kind of impact travel that combines a great beach vacation with an excursion from the hotel to support a real nonprofit cause. BeachCorps is the only impact travel that finds the best local nonprofits, not some “cause” invented to please a tourist. In this Beta phase, we encourage folks to help us develop and improve a kind of tourism that doesn’t exist in the world. If this tourism model works in the Dominican Republic as BeachCorps, it can work anywhere in the world under a thousand different names.
As described in the article, the Beach Bum is betting that an innovative new form of tourism. He’s betting that a growing number of millennials, students, couples, friends, businesses, baby boomers and families are going to want to relax sustainably at the beach, while taking a day or two to pay it forward. In a world increasingly dominated by a de-humanizing internet, more and more people crave real human interaction. The Beach Bum is 100% certain that along the way he’s going to have a lot of fun turning sustainable travel on its head.
