Today marks our 4th year, and we would like to take this opportunity to reflect and share our journey over the past year. We took the time to also review our vision and mission so that we continue to be aligned on them.

Our Vision and Mission – refined version

Setting up clear vision is important to bring the company moving to the right direction, so we took the time to review our vision and here is what we concluded:-

Vision: To be the leading responsible travel provider focusing on social economic sustainability

This vision highlights our company’s focus to stem directly towards  social economic sustainability of the community that we partnered with.

Mission: To provide unique experiential trips for travelers while empowering rural communities holistically

While Backyard Tour aims to provide the best quality trips to our customers, we want to be able to empowering our partner community holistically as well. This goes beyond just for our local champions who deliver their tour services during those trips, but also for their families and their fellow villagers – ranging from the young ones to the old ones.

If you are interested to know more about our company, you can read it here.

Journey Towards Voluntourism, a starting point

Voluntourism, by definition is the act or practice of doing volunteer work as needed in the community where one is vacationing. This was not really within our initial plan but we got the chance to run it. We accepted the offer from Empowering Youths Across ASEAN Programme, a collaboration between ASEAN Foundation and Maybank Foundation to host 10 youths from 8 other ASEAN countries. They are from Singapore, Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos. They were here from 16th February to 3rd March this year. While the program actually aims to empower the youths more, we reap the benefit of having a group of volunteers contributing back to Begu Village community.

Privilege on working with volunteers from EYAAP

During the volunteers’ stay with us, they got to visit three of our village partners. They were to get to know the community directly, so they spent few days in the villages. They had few ideas to further impact the community during their stay. However, they decided to focus on one idea, which is to help boost tourism activities for Begu Village. This was done through marketing video, booklets and signboard (as seen on picture above).

If you are an organization that is looking for volunteers, you can also register your organization. ASEAN Foundation has opened the application for second cohort, for year 2020, and it will be closed on 30 November 2019. You can apply here if you are interested. Make sure your organization is working on Community Empowerment, Arts and Culture, Environmental Diversity and Education.

More to come

We look forward for better future. We will be sharing more about our journey and impact summary in December.

Published Date: Oct 19, 2019