Welcome to my favorite way to travel!
When you travel especially in service to others, whether it’s building houses, volunteering to teach, or working to save endangered animals, you have the opportunity to connect with a cause greater than yourself and to learn from people who live different lives. Your worldview expands. You’ll most likely become a more tolerant, kind and peaceful person. You can be an inspiration! In a world where everyone wants to be understood and loved, let travel be the gateway to increasing your own capacity for empathy.
What is Habitat for Humanity and Global Village?
Habitat for Humanity International’s (Habitat) vision is for everyone to have a decent place to live. A non-profit organization, Habitat is a global leader in creating sustainable, safe and affordable solutions to the housing crisis. I first learned about Habitat when I was a student at Allegheny College and have been building houses ever since.
Global Village is Habitat’s short-term overseas building program. As a Team Leader I am able to pursue my first passion: connecting with people of other cultures. Many participants have described this experience as life changing.
What is the Fuller Center for Housing and Global Builders?
Eponymous Millard Fuller, founder of Habitat, started the Fuller Center for Housing with the same vision of eradicating poverty housing by promoting partnerships with individuals and community groups to build and rehabilitate homes for people in need. Global Builders is the international volunteer building program, with deep roots in the communities. Teams help support jobs for local workers, empowers the efforts of locally led affordable housing initiatives, and the chance to show love to teammates and locals in a way that you just can’t do staying at home.
What about other ways to travel in service to other?
In 2025 I lead a team to Tanzania in partnership with the Tanzanian non-profit, TAWREF (Tanzania Women Research Foundation). Established in 2010, their vision is a community where people are able to address social, cultural, economic, health challenges and transform their lives. With experts in health, community development, education, finance, information technology and research, they work in five districts of the Kilimanjaro region.
My team built the 154th home for TAWREF’s Shelter Project, helping to advance human dignity, self-esteem, social protection, hope, belonging and motivation to work hard as a pathway to future poverty alleviation. One of five TAWREF initiatives, the Shelter Project is a pathway to economic well-being, uplifting families’ wellbeing and linking them with business skills such as vegetable gardening. It encourages community ownership and accountability by voluntarily participating in the home construction process.
The project has significantly reduced shelter gaps between the haves and have nots in the community including improved neighborhoods.
The bottom line?
I don’t know how it is possible to wind up feeling like I’ve been given more than I gave, but it happens. It happens every single time I leave my home to connect with another culture and to help someone else have what has come so easily to me. This is why I build. Because on the work site the playing field is level. Racial, religious, economic, social barriers fade away while we co-labor. To me, this is the labor of love: to so lose yourself in the doing that you simply enjoy the being.
Write to me anytime to learn how to become a team member!
Global Staci 