Country: Cambodia

Organization: PEPY

Year the initiative began: 2005

Project Website: www.pepyride.org

Positioning in the Mosaic of solutions:

• Main barrier addressed: Lack of collaboration
• Main insight addressed: Education through hands-on experience

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What is the goal of your innovation?
To offer educational tour options designed with community input which provide consistent funding for innovative development solutions

How does your approach support or embody geotourism?
PEPY's model provides a means of allowing short-term travelers to impact long-term change. PEPY takes sustainability seriously in the trip designing process, choosing local, environmentally conscious, and/or socially-positive hotel and restaurant options whenever they are available. PEPY's sustainable tourism practices and environmental impact are reasons that travelers choose PEPY. In addition to funding local development programs in these areas, sustainable tourism and development are explored on the tours as educational topics for the participants themselves through visits to local development organizations. Many PEPY Tours involve working with local groups to teach environmental education classes in Cambodian schools. Profits from PEPY Tours fund the ongoing educational projects of The PEPY Ride, a registered non-governmental organization, and are fed directly back into the local communities visited on the tours.

Describe your approach in detial. How is it innovative?
Many volunteer travel options provide episodic spectacles for the sake of the tourists, often affecting little more than a layer of paint on a wall. PEPY makes funding and volunteer opportunity decisions with long-term impact in mind. If our travelers paint a fence, it is not just a fence we found that needs painting, but a fence at a school where we have a long standing relationship, fund year-long educational programs, support local teachers, and work with community input. We ask the communities if they would like foreign visitors and what projects they could help with while they are there. It seems like an obvious step, but many times people forget to ask. Our tours are not designed from a distant travel agency but within the communities themselves. Positive impact on the communities we work with, integrity of the funds we distribute to development programs, and community involvement in our decision making are keys to our success. Our tour leaders, trip developers, and sales team are all based in South East Asia and are committed to creating tours which are intended to give travelers a chance to learn as much as give back. We make sure to include opportunities for the communities we visit to act as the teachers as well, so travelers recognize they are not only giving, but receiving, both education and inspiration.

What types of partnerships or professional developement would be most beneficial in spearding your innovation?
Our areas of need include marketing expertise and technology solutions for web-based tour booking and data tracking. It would also be useful to develop partnerships with international educational institutions who could help us design and certify our educational programs so that foreign students could earn school credit by coming on our tours. Networking with educators who work in social entrepreneurship and sustainable tourism/development synergies would be useful as well because they might find our solution worthy of research or promotion.

In one sentence describe what kind of impact, change, or reform your approach is intended to achieve.
We aim to allow short-term travelers to impact long-term development in both the organizations and communities they visit and in their own lives.

Describe the degree of success of your approach to date. Clearly define how you measure quantitative and qualitative impact in terms of how your approach contributes to the sustainability or enhancement of local culture, environment, heritage, or aesthetics? How does your approach minimize negative impacts?
PEPY supports full-time programs in the communities we visit on our tours, so our impact is monitored continuously. We aim to positively impact education and use a variety of metrics to assess our impact. For example, on most PEPY Tours, guests visit the Angkor temples with students from The PEPY Ride School. We have chosen fourth grade students because the majority of school drop-outs happen in third grade. On-going projects plus the incentive of an educational trip to Angkor Wat in fourth grade, drop-outs have decreased by over 10%. Guests on our tours and their fundraising support our Bike-to-School Program, which allows students to earn a bicycle through high attendance and graduation from 6th grade. PEPY’s successful and ongoing impact is monitored through their increase in school attendance, attendance levels of parent and community meetings about education, enrollment and attendance in secondary school, and feedback from the teachers and community. Tour participants are also involved in our environmental education lessons, games, and books. As our environmental lessons are reinforced with each trip, all of the school grounds and surroundings have become remarkably cleaner and students now self-monitor and remind each other to use the garbage cans. At one school, students used to drink from the pump which was proven to have high levels of bacteria. The students worked with a PEPY tour group to design a mural on the wall next to the pump highlighting the need to use a water filter. Now, one year later, no one in the community drinks out of the pump, all students use the filters and can now bring water home with them at night from the classroom filters, and there has been a distinct increase in the number of homes with filters in the community. We are currently conducting a rural participatory survey which will provide more exact numbers of home filtration systems.

How does your program promote traveler enthusiasm, satisfaction, and engagement with the locale?
Facilitated local interaction is the basis of our tours. Everyone sees Angkor Wat. Not everyone gets to see it with a class of students who come from a village only 65km away in which only 5 out of 541 students had seen the famous temple emblazoned on their flag. By exposing our guests to the importance of this day for the students and their families, their enthusiasm increases. We have learned to set the expectations for our guests, who often see volunteering as giving physical labor, so that they realize in advance that often this one-on-one interaction with community members is the biggest gift they are giving to our on-going programs. If community members see wealthy foreigners drinking out of the filters that is reassurance that the water is indeed safe. Filter use increases after our tours visit and travelers are aware that theiir impact far outlasts their stay. Our monthly newsletters keep them informed of the ongoing impact, increasing enthusiasm even after the tour has finished

In what ways are local residents actively involved in your innovation, including participation and community input? How has the community responded to or benefited from your approach?
When planning community visits, we work with the community leaders to determine what activities are needed and appropriate for our tours. For our original tours, our suggestions would quickly be approved, perhaps from fear that speaking out would mean all relations would be ended between their community and PEPY. Due to our extended and visible presence in the community, we have found that the non-profits, teachers, and communities we work with have realized we are making a long-term commitment and are now open and honest about their issues and needs. They are also now the ones who generate ideas for our visiting groups as well as inform us if they think there might be a negative outcome from an activity we are considering. The reaction of the communities and groups we are working with has been positive and many who turn away other “tours” have welcomed PEPY as a partner. PEPY has brought in over $300,000 of funding for development programs in Cambodia since our first tour in 2005.

Describe how your innovation helps travelers and local residents better understand the value of the area's cultural and natural heritage, and educates them on local environmental issues. How do you motivate them to act responsibly in their future travel decisions?
Before participants travel with PEPY, we provide information about our environmental education and development programs and the areas in which they will interact with those programs during their trip. We introduce our guests to local environmental and heritage preservation groups, teach Cambodia’s dos and don’ts to increase our positive impact, and follow our trips with a reminder email about how to make their future trips and daily life more environmentally friendly. Our annual PEPY calendar includes monthly ideas about minimizing your negative impact! One of the reason we are able to impact their decisions in the long term is that our tours allow for daily group reflection time. Guests are encouraged to provide their own ideas about how we can improve our environmental and community impact, both for PEPY Tours and in their own lives. This gives them ownership of these initiatives, incentive to enact them themselves, and satisfaction when they inspire others to do the same.

Is your initiative financially and organizationally sustainable? If not, what is required to make it so? What is the potential demand for your innovation?
Our organization was created and designed to be financially sustainable, funding not only the tour operation itself but on-going development programs. PEPY has a unique two-part fee structure that requires guests to pay both a trip fee and a donation/fundraising minimum. This ensures the integrity of their donations by providing those funds directly to our non-profit partners. Furthermore, many participants tend to fundraise over the minimum required amounts, allowing for increased funding for the non-profit. The demand for our innovation is limitless. This is the travel option global travelers are looking for when they seek out “off the beaten path,” “responsible,” and “adventurous” travel.

How is your initiative currently financed? If available, provide information on your finances and organization that could help others. Please list: Annual budget, annual revenue generated, size of part-time, full-time and volunteer staff.
Currently PEPY is run by 6 full-time and 1 part-time Cambodian staff members. Throughout the year we have 4-8 full-time unpaid foreign volunteers who typically commit to work for long periods of time and so are offered accomodation in our office’s upper floors. The annual budget for PEPY Tours is $150,000..In addition, in 2007 the tours raised over $150,000 for educational programs, funded the construction of the second PEPY school, initiated a Bike-to-School Program at two schools in order to provide students with bicycles as a means of accessing secondary schools, and more!

What is your plan to expand your approach? Please indicate where/how you would like to grow or enhance your innovation, or have others do so.
Our internal limiting factor in the speed of our growth is identifying and qualifying potential development projects and partners. We have already identified partners in Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, Nepal, and East Timor and are looking to expand into those countries over the next 5 or more years. Laos and Vietnam are already on our schedule for 2008 and 2009 respectively. Through identifying like-minded partner non-profit organizations who already have monitoring and evaluation systems and staff in place in the areas we are expanding too, we are able to fund the expansion of their M&E programs to ensure that our partnership decisions and tour impact is having the intended effect on the communities. We will always design our tours with the help of PEPY staff and volunteers who are familiar with our currently working in the areas we visit so that we can build upon their community connections and maximize the number of eyes monitoring and reflecting on our impact.

What are the main barriers you encounter in managing, implementing, or replicating your innovation? What barriers keep your program from having greater impact?
Our biggest current barrier is exposure. We are offering the type of tour product current travelers are crying out for, but our tiny voice is not yet being heard far and wide. The rate at which we can identify and qualify partners while maintaining a commitment to limiting our invasive or negative impacts limits our growth rate. However, this does not limit our growth potential. We are growing at a rate we find sustainable, but we would benefit from increased exposure to our work to fill the tours which we currently offer and thus increase our impact. We have internally imposed limiting factors such are our own commitment to limit our tour visits to schools to a maximum of three visits per year to minimize distractions. We are already identifying potential future partners so that if our growth increased exponentially we would not need to rush our partner selection and end up supporting non-trustworthy people or programs. Cambodia’s needs are visible and widespread, so many people think it is be easy to find beneficiaries for our funding and volunteer time, but that is not the case. With high levels of corruption, PEPY makes partnership decisions based on transparency, management interviews, trial programs, and on-going monitoring and evaluation, so pre-qualifying our partners allows us to prepare for future expansion.

What is the origin of your innovation? Tell your story.
There is a non-profit on every corner in Cambodia, but sometimes they all seem to be in competition with each other for limited funding. The populations of tourists visiting Cambodia is growing exponentially and most of them state a desire to “help” but don’t know the best way to do so. Seeing both of these things and looking for an adventure besides, Daniela Papi and Greta Arnquist decided to cycle across Cambodia to learn more. They were joined by a team of four friends who raised funds to support educational non-govermental organizations (NGOs) they had identified. On their five week ride, they learned that donations need to be treated like investments that are researched and monitored after the check has been written. They also learned that many NGOs are more concerned about their donors than the communities they are supposed to benefit and that sustainable tourism requires education on both the parts of the local vendors as well as the travelers themselves. Greta and Daniela also discovered that many other people were interested in traveling by bike across Cambodia too. Thus, PEPY was born. PEPY provides sustainable funding for education programs, allowing them to focus on doing good work rather than searching for funds. PEPY provides educational opportunities for Cambodian students, community groups, and travelers that focuses on environmental protection and sustainable tourism practices. PEPY provides a way for travelers to find out about the smaller grassroots organizations who are making big changes and to see those projects first-hand and PEPY hopes to inspire tour participants to become advocates for the groups they visit.

Please provide a personal bio. Note this may be used in Changemakers' marketing material.
Daniela Papi graduated from Notre Dame University with a degree in Economics, worked for a consulting firm, and then left to work and travel through Asia. She knew volunteer travel was for her when she joined a volunteer trip to Nepal in 2002. She began to only travel with volunteer groups and enjoyed her trips but found that some seemed designed solely to provide a heart-warming experience for the foreign travelers, had a religious agenda, or didn’t provide much transparency and accountability regarding their funding. She and her friend, Greta Arnquist, decided to plan a cycling adventure through and dubbed their tour PEPY, “Protect the Earth. Protect Yourself.” because they were looking to fund environmental and health education programs. The first PEPY Ride funded the construction of The PEPY Ride School and has led to over $300,000 in fundraising for education programs, over 20 volunteer and adventure trips, the creation of an NGO based in Phnom Penh, and the opening of PEPY Tours.

Please write an overview of your project. This text will appear when people scroll over the icon for your entry on the Google map located on teh competition homepage.
PEPY offers volunteer, adventure, and educational tour options designed with community input which provide funding for long-term, innovative educational development programs.

Contact Information
Ms. Daniela Papi
Founder/Director
PEPY
PO Box 1235, Phnom Penh, Cambodia
d@pepyride.org