Experience Quest - Gap Year Travel

There is much talk nowadays in business about the "triple bottom line". For those of you which haven't heard of it before, this is the belief that, for any organisation (business, charity or otherwise) to be truly sustainable, it must take care of its financial, social and environmental impact.

Financial responsibilities are pretty easy to follow, make sure you can pay the bills but don't get too greedy. The social and environmental responsibilities of an organisation however are much more complicated, and generally can't be solved just by giving staff comfy chairs and making sure they recycle their paper. This is even more the case with volunteer organisations such as Quest, where we are working in very delicate areas such as developing nation communities and threatened forests.

As such, Quest takes its social and environmental impacts very seriously, and we do our best to make sure every aspect of our operation is sustainable, ethical and responsible:

• Quest is actively supporting the development of a UK recognised "International Volunteer Code of Practice", where organisations will be assessed as to the quality and suitability of their volunteer placements, and volunteers will be encouraged to follow its Volunteer Charter. In the meantime, we are ensuring that our projects follow the already established Code of Good Practice and Volunteer Charter, both developed by Volunteering Options Programme, which was set up by Comhlámh - the Association for Returned Development Workers in Ireland.
• Quest and Rainforest Alliance have established an alliance to support Best Management Practices in Sustainable Tourism
• We are an active member of Tourism Concern.
• Quest actively promotes Ethical Volunteering
• We do not go out and search for specific projects. All our project partnerships have grown over time, whenever we have found a project where there is scope for mutual benefit. By mutual benefit, we mean that all our projects have been developed with the benefit for the community AND the experience for our participants equally in mind.
• Our projects have been developed in partnership with established local initiatives or ongoing international support networks. This is to help ensure that the work our teams do can and will be maintained throughout the year.
• Project plans are developed with our local partners with a long term vision in mind. We aim to support a project for the long term, anything from 5 years to indefinitely. We also ensure that the work teams will be doing is realistic and appropriate (ie. that it is within the ability of our teams, but at the same time is not taking away work from locals)
• Our participants' project donations help to ensure that funds are available throughout the year to maintain the work done by teams. These funds are either channelled through our very own charity Quest4Change, or our partner charities.
• Quest4Change is actively fundraising alongside our expeditions to increase the level of support for our projects. So far we have raised nearly £1.5 million since 1996, every penny of which has gone directly to our projects overseas.
• Other project partners and supporters include Rainforest Concern, Excellent Development, Livingstone Tanzania Trust, Joshua Orphan Care, Jane Goodall Institute and Inti Wara Yassi.
• Quest expeditions work with local operators at all times (drivers, guides, porters etc.), and pay more than a fair fee for their work. We do not haggle down to the bottom dollar.
• Group sizes are kept to acceptable levels, to minimize our impact on trekking routes and project sites.
• We encourage all our participants to offset the carbon on their flights, and demand that all our staff do.
• We also keep our UK base minimum impact - simple office, recycle almost everything, energy conscious, paper free when possible, recycled paper when not, we've even started growing our own veg!

We are conscious that there is always more we can do, and are open to suggestions and recommendations.