Was there a moment in life where you recall an inflection point? When something happened that would profoundly influence your world view or the path you took?
For me, it was the opportunity to travel outside of the US. I was fortunate to have this experience, as a teenager in high school. I recall that a big world got just a bit smaller for me; that I could experience different cultures and food and history, but still realize that no matter where I went, people were still…people. And I remember the desire to travel more, starkly, upon reentry to the US through JFK Airport in New York City.
Over many more years and hundreds of thousands of miles traveled, those realizations became stronger; most acutely, in visits to winemakers in Europe, which felt like being welcomed into a family gathering. This feeling, and this experience, would set the stage for our mission and values.
The opportunity to get involved in the local Baltimore community intersected with this exact sentiment in a way I could not have predicted.
Late in 2020, I became aware of the work of Bianca Willis with her non-profit, Learning to Live Movement. Founded in 2015, Bianca provides the experience, and the gift, of travel to inner city children. Her robustly concise tagline, “Travel is the school of life”, is one I could never hope to state better myself. It reminds me of a line from the movie The Way, about a pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago in Spain: “You don’t choose a life, you live one.”
Bianca changes lives with the work she is doing. She helps children explore lands and cultures that are unfamiliar to them, in the process finding “themselves” and what they value. She makes the world smaller for them while they enjoy learning about others, and themselves.
There was no better testimonial for this than Aliyah, a young woman who recently experienced travel herself, and was so impacted by it that she now works with Bianca so she can help other children have this experience, too. There was a look in her eye and a passion in her voice, when she told me that the trip changed her life. This interaction moved me and is one I won’t forget.
While it is our view that businesses have a responsibility to positively impact the communities in which they operate, the opportunity to sponsor a non profit like this was a simple decision. Wide Roots is proud to be a sponsor of Learning to Live Movement, and to support their work in changing lives.