Meet The Traverse City Nonprofit Working To Drive Humanitarian Causes In Kenya

It started during the pandemic, when local travel writer Kim Schneider was pining for far-flung adventures that were all but impossible at the time. It’s evolved into a nonprofit that works to make life-changing impacts abroad, and to send people on trips that challenge their perceptions about what travel can be. This week, Schneider and her Uplift Travel Foundation will put those tenets on display at a trio of local events focused on spreading awareness and raising funds for period poverty in Kenya.

Schneider’s work has appeared in Parade, Midwest Living, and Michigan Blue, though she’s perhaps best-known locally for her 2018 book, 100 Things To Do in Traverse City Before You Die. When the pandemic grounded Schneider, she took to Facebook groups to connect with other travel experts around the world.

“We all had a lot of time to talk,” she laughs.

Those conversations helped Schneider see that, as dark as things seemed back home in Michigan, COVID-19 was wreaking far more havoc in less developed parts of the world. She found herself startled at conversations with travel guides in East Africa. In better times, those people would make a living by welcoming travelers and showing them around local villages, animal sanctuaries, and more. The pandemic stalled that industry completely.

“These guides didn’t have any safety net,” Schneider says. “They didn’t have any tourists, so they had no ways to feed their family.”

Schneider decided to organize a small group of friends to send relief funds to those struggling travel guides. In one case, she worked to send oxygen to a guide who was sick from COVID at an overcrowded hospital in Tanzania. The guide survived his illness; the 10 other people he was sharing a hospital room with weren’t so lucky.

“It definitely showed me that sending a little bit of money can truly save lives,” Schneider says.

Between the relationships she struck up online and the work she did to support struggling villages in Kenya, by the time Schneider actually made her first post-COVID trip to the country, she had a genuine connection to the people there. In one village, someone had even named their newborn baby after her.  

“It was just this really different travel experience,” Schneider says. “Helping in advance led to a connection that gave me a different kind of welcome when I showed up.”

And travel built around relationships and cultural understanding as much as “seeing the sites” also resonated with Schneider’s friends back in Michigan.

“So many people said to me afterward: ‘Now I want to go to Kenya, but I want to see it like you saw it, and I want you to go with me,’” she says. “So, I ended up planning a trip and taking a group of friends.”

Things snowballed from there. More people in Traverse City were hearing about Schneider’s Kenya trips and reached out to ask if she’d help them plan something similar.

The impact grew as well.

“Some of those people on the second trip really connected to the community, and one of them ended up coming back and fundraising to add water collection systems at one of the schools in Kenya,” Schneider says. “It was just a $350 system that collected water and put it into storage tanks. But we found out, when we went back on another trip, it had cured the region of typhoid. It was just so exciting to see how direct help could make such a difference to a community.”

Eventually, Schneider met Tanja Wittrock, another local travel enthusiast doing similar work in Guatemala. The two came together and started Uplift Travel, a nonprofit with the tagline “Meet the world. Do good.” Part travel agency and part foundation, Uplift connects travelers with guides in Kenya to plan trips that replicate the “profound connection and purpose” Schneider found there. The organization also takes on humanitarian projects, and that’s where period poverty comes in.

“Ahead of one of our trips, we said, ‘OK, we have 10 travelers coming, and we can all bring two extra suitcases. What do you need?’ And everybody – male and female – said, ‘We need menstrual pads.’ They just can't afford them,” Schneider tells The Ticker. “Girls there miss four days a month of school because of their periods, and they fall so far behind because of that. It's a big problem.”

A search for a sustainable solution led Uplift Travel to PadMad Kenya, a social enterprise that works to “empower adolescent girls and women in underprivileged and marginalized communities by providing access to vital education, menstrual hygiene management, and affordable, biodegradable, reusable menstrual pads.” Uplift is now working to raise money to deploy PadMad and its trainers to villages in Kenya – an effort that will be front and center at a fundraiser this Friday (October 10) at Brengman Family Wines.

Uplift Travel is also partnering with Northwestern Michigan College (NMC) and its International Affairs Forum (IAF) and Multicultural Club for two other events: a State Theatre Community Night on Wednesday and a “Walk to End Period Poverty in Kenya” at the Boardman Lake Loop on Saturday. The State Theatre event will include screenings of two documentaries, Powerful Women and Bleed with Pride that feature PadMad founder Madhvi Dalal. Dalal will be on hand at both that event and the Friday fundraiser.

According to Jim Bensley, NMC’s director of international services and service learning, the goal of the college’s involvement is to get students invested in a major societal problem that doesn’t just impact Kenya, but also underprivileged communities around the world –including right here in the United States.

Getting students invested now has another benefit, too: From May 4-18, a cohort of NMC students will travel to Kenya on a trip planned by Uplift Travel. That partnership is the latest new angle for NMC’s study abroad program, which has sent 750 NMC students to 26 different countries since 2013.

Pictured: Schneider (left) and Wittrock (second from right) in Kenya.