Sustainability At Our Core: How Road Scholar is Taking Care of Our Global Classroom
At Road Scholar, the world is our classroom — and we want to do our part to keep our classroom as beautiful as possible.
“It’s no secret that climate change is impacting the places we visit,” says Meghan Flynn, Associate Vice President of Program Strategy & Management at Road Scholar. “To ensure we can continue exploring the world for generations of future Road Scholars, we’re embarking on an educational journey of our own to become a more sustainable organization.”
That’s why we are excited to tell you that Road Scholar is proud to incorporate sustainability into our core value system. That means that as we plan and operate our learning adventures, we’ll be making efforts to reduce waste and support local communities as much as possible. We naturally have been doing some of this over the years but we are now making a concerted effort to recognize and improve upon that work.
“Road Scholar will train our staff and partners this year and implement program changes in 2025 to reduce waste,” says Meghan. “As we look forward to our 50th anniversary in 2025, we feel it’s the best possible way to celebrate — by making sure we are traveling and exploring the world as responsibly as we can. Our participants are concerned about climate change and we’ll share our progress along the way.”
Going forward, we’ll be …
- Training our staff on best practices for sustainability.
- Avoiding single-use plastics as much as possible!
- Working with our local partners and communities by purchasing items they make and choosing locally owned restaurants.
- Increasing our mindfulness to reduce food waste and use locally sourced food whenever possible.
- Prioritizing eco-friendly lodging.
- Continuing to fund projects that offset the amount of CO2 created by flying almost 67 million miles in economy class. These projects are the equivalent of planting more than 220,000 seedlings — and allowing those trees to grow for 10 years.
Learn more about our commitment to sustainability on our website.