It was just over 12 years ago, on Barbara’s first Intrepid trip—a month-long adventure through Thailand and Vietnam—that her philanthropic journey kicked off. The trip included a visit to a local non-profit in Vietnam called KOTO. Barbara and her fellow travelers learned how the grassroots organization in Hanoi was working to provide hospitality training and job opportunities to disadvantaged youth in Vietnam.
The way she tells it, seeing how other people lived during her travels and hearing how the organization worked, triggered a lightbulb moment that changed the way Barbara approached life from there on out. “Many people don’t travel to places where they see the world being really different,” she says, “and I think that makes it hard to understand what’s really going on in the world. It’s hard to understand what life is like in India, for example, if you haven’t been to Delhi. It’s just, it’s not real—it’s too different than what it is here.”
‘Here’ in Barbara’s case is the East Coast, USA. Back home after that trip, she made a donation to KOTO through The Intrepid Foundation. “If you’ve seen how people live in other places and what matters to them, it’s hard not to feel some sense of connection with them,” she says.
Since that trip, she’s been on nearly 30 more Intrepid adventures and has made over 100 more donations to The Intrepid Foundation, all in the spirit of that moment she had 12 years ago in Vietnam.
