Birthright Earth

In May 2008, I hadn’t yet figured out a solid plan for my summer. A competitive internship hadn’t landed in my lap and a summer abroad program wasn’t in the cards. All I knew was that I wanted to be in New York City. My father, Richard Devane, had been working in eco-tourism for about five years. During that same spring, he and I had discussed the possibility of an environmental student travel organization modeled after the Taglit-Birthright Israel program. After some debate about the idea we settled on the name Birthright Earth and I took the start-up on as my summer job with Eli joining up within my first week in New York. Fast-forward eighteen months, long nights, hundreds of meetings, and more than a few days when it felt like everything was going to fall apart and suddenly I’m a President of a registered non-profit?

The founding and operation of this program has been and continues to be a whirlwind process, both more exciting and terrifying than any internship I think I could have had that summer. After summer ended, Eli and I looked forward to bringing Birthright Earth to Wesleyan’s campus, where we were confident the creative and vibrant community would embrace the idea and help us grow the organization. We were right. President Roth met with us to discuss BE on campus, students turned out in droves for benefit concerts we hosted and signed up that the student activities fair for our newsletter. This year, the SBC has helped us continue grassroots fundraising and Mike Sciola from the Career Resource Center advised us on growing our campus presence. Much of our volunteer staff that currently works for Birthright Earth is made up of either Wesleyan undergrads or ’09 graduates. Basically, without Wesleyan, we’d be nowhere.

Birthright Earth has always been about people, about people’s mindsets, people’s motivations, and people’s willingness to act together. We believe that through direct exposure to rare ecosystems such as the Amazon rainforest, young people will gain the motivation and consciousness necessary to tackle environmental issues through their own innovations. We send 18-26 year old young people on 10-day trips to one of ten eco-lodges in the South American rainforests. These lodges are operated by Tropical Nature Travel, our sister organization. The trips are awe-inspiring and educationally based, with trip leaders, resident researchers and guides interacting with the trip participants. Visits to local sustainability projects and tours of the rainforest are complimented by evening round table discussions and guest speaker lectures.

Everyone who currently works for Birthright Earth does so as a volunteer, from Eli and myself to our web managers, marketing team, and campus representative network. We rely on each other and each person’s ability to balance their commitments in order to keep the program growing. Our campus representative network has created a Birthright Earth presence on over 30 campuses nationwide this year. We are locked into a massive fundraising effort through grant application, private philanthropy, and corporate sponsorship that will help make our trips possible this coming summer.

In some ways, we model our organization after our organization’s ultimate goals. In working to provide an awe-inspiring adventure and so much more to entire generations, we prop the door open for Wesleyan alums and others to help us in that process and leave your mark on Birthright Earth.

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