Winner: CT20! Voluntourism Scholarship 2015

Over the summer, we welcomed San Diego State University's Hospitality and Tourism Management students to apply for a give-back trip to Fiji in January 2016. We narrowed it down to our final three, and you picked the winner!

Kendall will represent Cadence by documenting her experience through blog posts, social media and photography. Donate toward the scholarship here, or read on to see just why we thought Kendall was the perfect candidate... and don't forget to congratulate her in the comments section below!

Question #1: Do you have a passion for helping? Do you want to visit another country?
"As a hospitality student, my two most compelling passions are service and traveling. Service extends beyond just customer service, but to community service as well. On the travel side I'm also a little bit of an adventure junkie, and traveling to Fiji to do volunteer work sounds like the ultimate adventure."

Question #2: What aspect of this voluntourism trip are you most excited about?
"Give Clean Water's home page begs the question, "What if you could change the world?" On a voluntourism trip like this I would be so excited to find out what I can do as one person to help better the lives of others on that global scale. Traveling to a place as beautiful as Fiji is exciting in itself, but getting to help the locals and the poverty stricken side of Fiji that less people know about is even more so."

Question #3: In what way will you excel best at documenting your trip?
"I would document the trip in a variety of different ways, but probably best through social media and videos. I would set up a hashtag that the whole team could post too to get a comprehensive view of the trip from different points of view, as well as set up an account for the trip with my own photography and written description in the captions that could be followed as the trip goes on. I would also want to follow up the experience with a GoPro video montage of our adventures, service we completed, and people we met along the way to be posted to social media after the team returns from Fiji."

Question 4: Have you ever been on a voluntoursim trip before?
"Unfortunately I have never been on a voluntourism trip before. My volunteering growing up was usually locally organized through my church to shelters, community gardens, or trips to Feed My Starving Children to pack food to be sent around the world (my personal favorite). In college I serve on the board for Aztec Dance Marathon as a Public Relations assistant to support Rady Children's Hospital in San Diego, but most of my volunteer work has been local. I would love to be able to volunteer around the world in addition to my local work."

Question #5: What does voluntourism in travel mean to you?
"Voluntourism is a responsible way to see the world. Voluntourism promotes not only visiting a foreign country, but understanding it and helping it. It's easy to travel the world and only see whats on the surface, but immersing and learning about local cultures around the world is what really makes travel so enriching. To me voluntourism is the concept that when we head back home from out travels, we are not just leaving the place the way we found it, but rather even better than when we arrived."

We are so excited to watch Kendall document her experience in Fiji. If you'd like to donate toward the $5000 scholarship, you're welcome to here.