Empowerment
What is
#EmpowermentTourism
Empowerment Tourism is about taking a community on a journey, showing them what is possible using the skills they have, those we can teach, and the opportunities we can provide. At the end of that journey, the local community should be able to support themselves and continue to grow with a sense of pride that is harder to achieve when you are continually being provided with external support.
Travellers come away not only having seen the country’s famous sights but knowing first hand their funds and time have created new jobs, provided builders opportunities and left someone inspired on a new business venture. Empowering the world can start on your next trip, or as we have found more recently, can start closer to home.
Our Empowerment journey has now grown beyond travel and tourism, and we have expanded into storytelling projects through documentaries, and projects closer to home via SLAK: Spreading loving acts of Kindness, full details of these projects can be found below.
Featured Projects
Cairns Indigenous Culture Day
This full-day experience has been created by the local community to give you an authentic and genuine chance to learn, create and understand traditional methods of weaving, art, food and dance.
Thive Seed Accessories
Thive Seed Accessories is one of the women empowerment projects of Thrive Seed, an NGO helping bring education to the slums in Delhi, founded and managed by local leader Sonu.
Jaipur Cooking School
This unique cultural cooking experience in Jaipur is ideal for groups of up to 10 guests who want to cook up a storm. Learn from the locals how to make authentic Rajasthani cuisine while supporting a community in a slum, not far from the city centre on Prem Nagar, Agra Road.
Welcome to
Hands on Journeys
Our philosophy revolves around conscious travel. Exploring all the awe-inspiring and faraway places of the world is our passion, but we didn’t want to do this from within a protective bubble. Instead, we have dedicated ourselves to giving back. Connecting, educating, respecting local traditions, and broadening viewpoints are our goals as an organisation.
Hands on Journeys works in a similar way to a normal tourism company and is certainly not voluntourism which we believe is harmful to local communities. Instead, a percentage of the funds from each tour creates local projects and local employment, and it is these success stories that travellers get to visit during their tour, to see how their funds have provided direct benefits.
Empowerment through
SLAK
SLAK: Spreading loving acts of Kindness, is the first empowerment concept that has been founded closer to home, in Sydney, Australia. SLAK flowers is the first embodiment of this, creating training and employment opportunities for people who are homeless.
Not all people who are homeless are unemployed or without opportunities, but for those that are, finding a job can be a never-ending struggle. A lack of opportunity, unfounded judgement, and a system designed to hinder rather than support keep countless doors closed.
Thus begins a heartbreaking loop. Without employment, a permanent address is hard to come by. Without a permanent address, employment opportunities are seriously limited. It often isn’t a lack of want or dedication to break the cycle, it’s that the cycle has been created by those who simply don’t understand these struggles. People who haven’t taken the time to address and fix these obvious injustices that we have in the modern world. SLAK flowers launched in Sydney in late 2020, with the plans to grow the opportunities across Australia in the coming years.
Empowerment through
Storytelling
The Empowerment Tourism concept is born through connections, real and raw. These intimate human connections are what allow us to have honest conversations to proceed, fully understanding exactly what the local community need to grow.
Storytelling places a huge part in this, allowing travellers and others outside of our immediate circle to understand the why.
Simla Sooboodoo (founder of the Empowerment Tourism concept) has produced, with a local team, the award-winning documentary film Dehlight (currently in film-festival screen staging). The film follows the life in a Dehli slum, covering poverty, child labour and the empowerment tourism concept that evolved here – this journey ends in New York City, with the fashion work of these inspirational women reaching the runways of Fashion Week.
Future productions by Soodboodoo are on the cards, with filming soon to commence (current health situation allowing) on the Australian bushfires from the Aboriginal perspective. For over 60000 years, Aboriginal people successfully managed Australia’s environment and traditional owners want the Federal Government to hand back control to implement cultural land management methods. A story worth shining the spotlight on.