African Impact

If you go in the winter, bring warm clothes to wear on the early morning game drives. It will warm up later, but the early mornings can be cold in the open-air vehicles.

Advice for friends traveling overseas: Be ready to have the adventure of a lifetime and open yourself to new ideas and cultures. Your heart and mind will never be the same.

You're up early for game drives, where you do research on animals; then some days you go into the community to help with reading or farming programs.

Other days, you will go on a game drive, then input data into the computer and have time to listen to talks on animal behavior, poaching, and African culture. We also participated in debates and did presentations on animals.

This was a hand-on learning experience.

I've been abroad several times, so I'm pretty comfortable, but one fear I had was being older than a lot of the participants since the pictures showed a lot of young people. I was one of the older people, but it turned out to be a lot of fun to be around the fun and energy of students and they were very welcoming.

A lot of people at home ask me if going to Africa on a safari is safe. I felt very safe in this program. The people of South Africa are some of the kindest, friendliest people I've ever met. They have the biggest hearts and smiles. As far as being safe from animals, our guides explained that the animals are used to cars being around them and view the car as one large solid object. As long as you keep your hands and body inside the space of the car, they will ignore you.

Countless times I have had close encounters with lions, rhinos, elephants, and cheetahs in a safari car and never had any trouble with them. For the most part, they just want to get away or ignore you.

There are so may it is hard to list. I am so proud of how many have returned to us and have found their lives passion through the experience. There are Doctors of scientist and anthropology in the world today that have come about as a result of experiencing our projects, the exposure to your passionate teams. We have had story books published by participants who are now well recognised, the books begin put together as part of, and in order to support our projects through essential donations and awareness. We have had those that are now married with children - who met at our location. Without a doubt every single person that joins us firstly doe snot want to leave and secondly is likely to return, I love hearing this and do on a daily basis. We are African Impact, the impact we make is on people and communities, it is on wildlife and habitats/the environment and just as importantly it is on our volunteers and interns - we set out to build informed ambassadors for conservation across the board whilst giving each and every one of them a life changing experience. I am proud to say we more than succeed at this.

The ones I established and run :) I am bias however! I have visited many of the projects and locations over the years, however I would love to see the projects in Zanzibar and Kenya. I have visited Zanzibar previously and it is an incredible place, the projects there are marine focused which I have an affinity to with my past. Kenya has a special place in my heart. For me, vising other locations is an opportunity to learn form one another. For us to see first hand how things are run and learn what we can. We do have a good communication structure in African Impact but there is nothing like being face to face and working together, to have the cultural exchange and to benefit from one anther's experience and expertise.

We are unique as African Impact largely due to our values. Be it toward our projects and our teams. I am extremely proud to be a part to this organisation, the impact of the work is palpable and blows my mind daily. We have consistent support sessions with our team members to ensure everyone is on track, not only with their role expectations and performance but further in their personal lives. We are only as good and strong as the people we work with. One pillar is only as strong as the one next to it and we must all share the load. African Impact is an inclusive and powerful operation. The attention to detail when it comes to the volunteer and interns experience as well as the imapct they make through the work they do is scrutinised through grueling processes before a projects establishment and throughout its running. We have meticulous monitoring and evaluation to ensure we are consistently achieving what we set out to, and more. I believe in numbers, I believe in measurement, one of the things we do well is measure the work we do, ourselves, our projects and our overall success.

Well, as mentioned above, measurement and evaluation, passion form the roots up and the canopy down. Communication and fair support. I believe that people make things happen, be it staff running the projects, or the project base, to the volunteers and interns that join us. We must look after everyone, ensure everyone is well motivated, is passionate through doing what they want to be doing, to be moving forward and for the impact that we collectively make to be such that the progressions of Africa's needs is supported and moving forward. Further to this, I use the analogy that finding a need in Africa is like finding a grain of sand on a beach, whilst that may sound sad, it is not, it is ripe with opportunity, what we do need to do, and as African Impact we do well, is selecting the right grains of sand to collect and work on ensuring that we are as effective as possible. We cannot solve all issues however we can take the focus areas that we do and ensure we are successful. As previously mentioned this is done through stringent measuring and evaluation.