Conservation Volunteers International Program, Inc.

Conservation Volunteers International Program is dedicated to helping sustain some of the world's greatest landscapes, cultural heritage sites and biodiversity.

Our primary goal is to help the land managers protect their environmental resources. We recruit, organize and supervise volunteers to work on conservation projects which would otherwise not be done. Our volunteers provide valuable support to important public lands which are underfunded and understaffed. They work on projects such as building and maintaining trails which protect fragile landscapes and animal habitat and keep streams clear, planting trees, removing invasive species, and clearing vegetation from archaeological sites, thus preserving inspiring open space for future generations.

Because there is a history of popular support for parks in the U.S., the major U.S. public lands generally receive support from local volunteer groups, they have volunteer program managers, and they have identified tasks which can be performed by volunteers. In these cases, we often provide the land managers with volunteers who are willing to perform some of the more rigorous volunteer work, and we provide leaders who can help supervise the work.

For public lands in other countries, local volunteer support is often rare or nonexistent, and the ability of the land managers to organize and supervise volunteer work is extremely limited. In these destinations, we help to identify work which can be performed by volunteers, provide the primary management oversight of the work, and train and educate local land managers. Our goal is to build good will with the Parks and the local populations, to share our knowledge of conservation techniques, and to demonstrate by our actions that it is possible for volunteers to have a significant positive impact on their sites. In the long-term, our goal for our international parks is to inspire these parks and their local populations to help develop local volunteer support like we have in the U.S.

Our secondary goal is to expand the pool of people inspired to volunteer to help public lands. Many of our destinations have suffered because they are popular with tourists who are loving them to death. We focus our marketing on people who like to travel and introduce them to volunteering as a better way to travel which benefits the sites they care about. Because our volunteers enjoy the experience and feel rewarded when they see how they have contributed to these sites, they often resolve to travel on more volunteer trips with ConservationVIP, and to do more volunteering in their local parks. The other side of this equation is that, because we bring travelers who want to help them, the destinations realize that some of the tourists who visit them truly care about them and their sites. We think that by facilitating this mutual respect and understanding, we can accomplish our third key goal of building friendships across cultures, one kilometer at a time.

Conservation VIP's strategy is driven by the challenge of achieving our mission to help sustain some of the world's greatest landscapes, cultural heritage sites and biodiversity, while relying on volunteers and limited financial resources.

As a small nonprofit with limited resources, we have slowly built our activities, expanding one site at a time. We focus on caring for our destinations and our volunteers and partnering with others to leverage our limited resources. We must provide a valuable service to our destinations to be invited back to help them. We find that the good will and trust we have built with our beneficiary parks helps us expand to other destinations. We also must provide a meaningful and positive experience for our volunteers. Because the type of international environmental volunteer work which we promote is not a common or well-established activity, attracting volunteers is an ongoing challenge. By ensuring that our volunteers have a good experience, we increase the likelihood that they will repeat their participation and recommend our volunteer trips to others, enabling us to expand further. When possible, we partner with others to provide the many necessary support services, allowing us to focus on the activities where we bring value-added.

The best way to illustrate our strategy is to describe our early development: ConservationVIP's activities began in 2007 in Torres del Paine National Park in Patagonia, Chile. Torres del Paine is a UNESCO Reserve of the Biosphere, a site with tremendous ecological significance and inadequate resources to deal with the impact of rising tourism from around the world. We established relationships with the Torres del Paine managers and with travel service providers, to ensure a meaningful, safe, and productive experience for the park and our volunteers. Our next destination was Machu Picchu Sanctuary, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Like Torres del Paine, we worked to establish relationships with the park management and service providers to provide positive experiences for our volunteers. Next, we added a trip to Yosemite National Park. In addition to fulfilling our mission of serving one of the world's greatest landscapes, this location allows us to introduce people to our activities at a location which requires less time and expense commitment for the volunteers. Other destinations followed.

From 2010 - 2021, we partnered with REI Adventures who advertised our trips and handled the logistics of signing up volunteers for our trips, allowing us to more rapidly expand our reach. When they ceased foreign travel activities in 2021 due to the COVID pandemic, we scrambled to take on the logistical challenges of enrolling volunteers because we understood how important our help is to the destinations we serve. We are proud to say that we not only continued to support them, but we also added a new destination in 2022 (Cinque Terre).

The key resources required for our operations are experienced people to lead our trips, people with specialized skills to perform the many administrative, travel planning, and marketing functions required, and financial resources to sustain the operations.

We have the resources necessary to sustain our operations at the current level. We believe that we will be able to continue to attract experienced, qualified volunteers to lead our volunteer trips. We have been investing in information systems which will allow us to expand while keeping staffing to a minimum. However, we believe we have reached the limit in terms of relying on volunteers to staff the management and support functions. We have outsourced some administrative functions and we have added part-time staff while maintaining adequate financial strength. To meet our goal of expanding our activities, we will need to hire more staff to handle the increased workload. This plan will be challenging but feasible if we carefully manage our growth, given our operating model.

Because we do not want to burden our beneficiary sites with costs and we do not have the benefit of an endowment, we developed an operating model wherein our volunteers pay fees which cover the direct costs of running the volunteer trips, including expenses such as food, lodging, transportation, etc. and the overhead expenses such as insurance, information technology, reserves to cover contingencies and to build working capital to allow us to expand our beneficiary sites. We have kept our overhead low by operating as a virtual organization, relying on a virtual office and technology to minimize fixed expenditures. This financial model both limits our down-side risk and constrains the rate at which we can expand our beneficiary sites. As our expansion plans mature, we plan to seek grant money to support more expansion of our activities.

One of the other significant challenges we face is marketing. Because we are small and not well-known and we are recruiting volunteers for activities which are uncommon, we face an ongoing challenge to recruit sufficient numbers of volunteers. We are slowly building our reputation via online reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations. We are also working on initiatives to increase our social media presence and our website visibility, and we are building our marketing expertise.

While we view expansion as a challenge, based on what we have accomplished to date, we have confidence that with the support of our dedicated volunteers we will successfully meet that challenge.

We have made significant progress since our founding in 2007. In our initial year of operation, we organized one volunteer trip to Torres del Paine National Park in Patagonia. In 2022, we organized thirteen volunteer trips to nine different destinations. In total, thru the end of 2022, Conservation Volunteers International Program has organized 108 volunteer trips which contributed 55,776 hours of volunteer work to the destinations we serve. We have been able to expand and serve more parks despite operating without any endowment, because we are run by dedicated volunteers who are committed to our cause.

In an achievement well beyond our initial plans, during this period we also have been instrumental in raising funds for and constructing five very important hikers' bridges in Torres del Paine National Park. We have also donated a variety of goods and equipment to our beneficiary parks to enable them to better carry out their work. Our donations have included items such as camera equipment to track sea turtles in the Galapagos, trail maintenance equipment in several national parks, rope and related climbing equipment for search and rescue activities in Machu Picchu and sunglasses to protect the eyesight of Machu Picchu rangers working at high elevation.

As another barometer of our progress, our volunteer trips have achieved very high satisfaction ratings among our volunteer trip participants, which is critical to our ability to continue to recruit future volunteers and is an indicator of our trip participants' growing commitment to volunteering.

What's next? We see significant unfulfilled needs for conservation-oriented volunteer help in public lands. We plan to continue to expand to serve more parks. We plan to do this in a careful, thoughtful manger to ensure that we continue to offer safe, rewarding volunteer experiences for our volunteers and high quality volunteer services for the destinations we serve. As we stretch to expand our outreach, our focus on quality and service will remain unchanged.