Empowered to Explore: Why Every Young Person Deserves to Travel

“I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.”
— James Baldwin

There’s a unique kind of transformation that only happens when we step outside our daily routines and into unfamiliar places. Travel is about excitement, adventure, and newness. But it can also be unsettling, unpredictable, and even uncomfortable. And that’s exactly where the growth happens.

This is certainly true for myself – I have been traveling, working and living in many countries and learned so much through this – and it is also true for young people who participate in youth travel programs, domestically or internationally.

In the world of youth development and international education, I’ve had the privilege of witnessing this transformation firsthand. Travel doesn’t just broaden horizons—it stretches the mind, reshapes perspectives, and often gives young people their first deep encounter with themselves.

James Baldwin captured it perfectly: in the act of meeting others, we also meet parts of ourselves we didn’t know existed. One young man I worked with traveled from the U.S. to South Africa while still in high school. Years later, he told me that experience helped him navigate college and gave him the resilience to stay and finish. “How so?” I asked. He said, “I learned how to be uncomfortable and still move forward. I learned how to talk to people who came from very different backgrounds than mine—something I never had to do in my own neighborhood.”

Stories like this reflect what Baldwin also noted:

“A journey is called that because you cannot know what you will discover on the journey, what you will do with what you find, or what you find will do to you.”

It’s not just about seeing new places. It’s about developing new muscles—resilience, empathy, curiosity, and courage. Young people learn to navigate the unknown, to connect with others whose lives look very different from theirs, and to recognize the shared human experience beneath those differences.

At a time when global challenges—from climate change to inequality—require deep cooperation across cultures and borders, the ability to understand and collaborate with people from different parts of the world isn’t a luxury. It’s a necessity. But for collaboration to be meaningful, it has to be grounded in equity. That means creating access to international experiences for all young people—not just the privileged few—and ensuring that when we come together across borders, everyone’s voice matters.

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness…”
— Mark Twain

Twain believed that the exposure travel offers could wipe away bias and ignorance. While this certainly can be true, I am with Maya Angelou who added the central importance of shared experiences when meeting others:

“Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.”

In the end, that’s the hope—that by meeting the world, we better understand each other, and ourselves. And maybe, just maybe, we grow into the kind of people who can build a better world together.

I am so excited to have joined I AM WE ARE in making such experiences possible for many.