Digital nomads turn to ‘transformative travel’ to find themselves and connect with global communities offline
- Transformative travel enables people to break away from the stresses of modern life by finding eco-villages, social projects and farms
- It’s a modern day tale of self-discovery with a growing number of millennials using online tools to find offline global communities
David Casey was in his early 20s, a fresh University of California, Berkeley, graduate, when he first encountered the gift economy through the phenomenally successful Couch Surfing website. He was blown away by the way the site offered global access to a shared resource pool.
At the same time, he began to discover the underground network of self-discovery spaces where people could learn about different lifestyles, skills and trades. It was a journey that would lead to NuMundo (numundo.org), an online network that enables personal transformation through travel.
“I was meeting a lot of travellers and realising that I was an expert on these [personal transformation] spaces,” says Casey, CEO and founder of NuMundo. “People I’d met only once or twice were affected by the conversations they’d had with me and emailed later asking for recommendations of places to go. After the 200th email, I put a list up online.”
A year on, in 2013, that list became the foundation of Numundo, a platform connecting people with what he calls “impact centres” – farms, eco-villages, social projects and communities around the world.
He was in part influenced by his experience of Vipassana, an ancient Indian meditation technique. No one involved in the teaching of Vipassana receives any money, and there is no charge for students.