Hands Up Holidays
Hands Up Holidays is all about giving you fulfilling holiday experiences that provide you with a sense of achievement, purpose, and incredible stories through trips that combine eco-sightseeing with a meaningful taste of volunteering.
These volunteer adventures are for you if:
- you are interested in having a break, want to explore a destination, and also give something back to a local community.
- you value meaningful interaction with other cultures - achieved through the medium of volunteering.
- you value small group or tailor-made sustainable tourism practices that directly benefit local communities.
- you do not have specific skills, but have a lot of enthusiasm and a positive attitude (OR if you do have specific skills, we will match your skills where possible)
Most of these trips are upmarket, some of them even luxurious in terms of accommodation, as we know that this is your holiday, and volunteering does not have to involve sleeping on the floor; luxury volunteering is our specialty - although we can arrange this if you prefer, and will gladly tailormake a trip to suit your budget and requirements.
The volunteering portion of your trip is generally 4 days out of a 14 day trip - not enough time to save the world, but sufficient to make a positive impact, rub shoulders with the local people, and have your worldview challenged.
Ethical and Environmental Policy
Our Responsible Tourism Policy is broken down into three parts:
1. Economic Responsibility:
- Use of Local Guides: Hands Up Holidays is committed to using local guides, and we are committed to the training and mentoring of local people with the potential to become guides. Our guides are trained in responsible tourism and will help our travellers to be both culturally and environmentally sensitive.
- Retention of trip costs in local communities: Hands Up Holidays is committed to investing in local communities, and we aim to retain a significant portion of our travellers’ trip cost in the destination country. We contract with tour operators that use, wherever possible, locally owned and operated hotels and restaurants. We offer opportunities for travellers to purchase local crafts and food, and our guides will provide guidance on appropriate places to shop for these.
- Hands-on community development work: All of our trips involve a component of community development work, and as such, our travellers have an opportunity to contribute directly to the local communities they visit.
In addition, a portion of each traveller’s trip cost goes to support the development project for that trip. For instance, where our travellers are building a house, the cost of the materials required is included in the trip cost.
In other areas, the trip cost includes a donation to the charity supported by that trip. Our development projects are carefully selected in conjunction with local charities to ensure that our travellers’ work will be of maximum benefit to the local community but are also ones that involve travellers working side-by-side with the local people to improve their circumstances – part of our philosophy that our help should be a “hand up” and not a “hand out.”
Hands Up Foundation: In addition, Hands Up Holidays Ltd. has established a charitable trust to support our community partners on an ongoing, sustainable basis; we hope that this will provide our travellers with an opportunity to maintain a vital link with the community development projects in which they participated. Hands Up Holidays is committed to investing a portion of our profits into this charity, and we cover 100% of the administrative expenses associated with the charity so that donations from our travellers go directly towards the projects.
Carefully thought-through projects: Our volunteer projects are designed so that even if you have no specific skills, you can make a difference, but if you do have specific skills, we will match those wherever possible and put you to good use!
2. Environmental Responsibility:
- Sustainable travel: Hands Up Holidays is committed to sustainability, in the communities in which we operate and in the ecosystems we encounter. We seek to minimise the impact of our trips by minimising and properly disposing of waste created, by conserving energy and water, and by ensuring that endangered wildlife and environmentally compromised areas are treated with respect.
- Environmentally-focused community development projects: In a number of destination countries, the community development aspect of our trip is directly focused on improving the natural environment. These projects include gardening, planting trees, harvesting crops, or helping preserve endangered animals.
- Small group size: Our independent travel options and small group sizes help us to tread lightly and to use more environmentally sound forms of transport, minimizing impact, and ideally enriching the environment.
- Carbon Neutral: A way we seek to conserve the environment is by including an “eco-contribution” costing the price of our tours. Hands UpHolidays pays for this on behalf of you, our guests. The amount of this eco-contribution is based on a calculation of the carbon dioxide emissions from the flights required to participate in our tour and will pay for the planting of the equivalent number of native trees that will soak up the carbon dioxide emissions – where practical, travellers will even have the option of planting the tree/s themselves.
- Environmental training: Many of our guides are trained in principles of environmental sustainability and will offer travellers tips on how to conserve water, reduce waste, and otherwise minimize the environmental impact of their trip. We hope that our travellers will be able to take some of the conservation tips they learn from our guides home with them.
- Corporate recycling/energy policy: Wherever possible, Hands Up Holidays employees use recycled paper and recycle waste created in the office, as well as attempting to minimise waste created and be a “paper less” office. We also work to minimise energy and water consumption in our offices, and we encourage our partners to follow similar waste management and energy philosophies.
3. Social Responsibility:
- Pre-Trip Information: We send each traveller a pre-departure pack, describing the destination country, its history, cultural norms, and general health and visa requirements. We also provide important practical information such as how to pack and dress appropriately, what to expect when encountering the local populations, how much money they will need to bring, etc.. We encourage travellers to try to learn a few phrases in the local language(s) before they arrive. Most importantly, we encourage all of our travellers to arrive with an open mind and to be prepared to have their world-views gently challenged by the new cultures they will encounter.
- Cultural Sensitivity: An important benefit of using local guides during our trips is the training they can provide to travellers in cultural sensitivity. Our guides will coach our travellers in general best practices (e.g. how to avoid encouraging a “begging” mentality, how to be sensitive in photographing local people, etc.) as well as specific tips on how to avoid running afoul of local customs. Wherever possible, we schedule the community development component of our tours in the middle of the trip, so that travellers will have a chance to acclimate to their new environment and learn how to behave in a culturally sensitive manner prior to this part of the trip, where the interaction with the local community is particular intense.
- Protection of Child Welfare: For those community development project that involve interaction with children, we require a police check to be carried out by the traveller, in order to project the children from physical, emotional, or sexual harm.
- Homestays and Language Immersion: On some of our itineraries, we are able to offer travellers a chance (entirely optional) to stay in the home of a local family, thereby achieving a unique level of cultural exchange. Travellers wishing to participate in a home stay will receive special instruction from their local guides to prepare them for the experience. In addition, through our tailormade trip offerings, we are able to offer interested travellers a chance to participate in an intensive language immersion program in either Spanish (Latin American destinations) or French (Vanuatu, Morocco and Rwanda).
- Community Development: In addition to the community development component of each of our trips, Hands Up Holidays also encourages its employees to volunteer in their own communities and we offer each employee 5 days per year to participate in such projects. In addition, we encourage our staff to participate in our community development projects through partially subsidized holidays for staff and their families.
- Volunteering where you live: Part of our vision at Hands Up Holidays is to enable our guests to experience how fulfilling and rewarding volunteering is, and to inspire our guests to volunteer for longer periods of time, and to volunteer where they live. We have information on suitable volunteer projects in the UK, such as teaching English to refugees, which we make available to all our guests.
Hands Up Holidays is listed in the following categories
Travel & Holidays / Ethical HolidaysTravel & Holidays / Eco Tourism Services
Travel & Holidays / Travel Agents & Operators
Travel & Holidays / Volunteering Holidays
