SEA CHANGE
Call it voluntourism or impact travel – it’s the cruise that combines Caribbean cocktails with community development. Maggie Scardifield heads to the Dominican Republic to lend a hand.
Call it voluntourism or impact travel – a cruise to the Dominican Republic combines Caribbean cocktails with community engagement.
Marcia halts in the middle of a song, an old gospel number with the syncopated rhythm of the Caribbean. Her friend Illuminada welcomes us in the relaxed Spanish spoken in the Dominican Republic. “It all starts here,” she says. I sit in a circle of women around big blue bins filled with scrap paper, and we exchange stories about men and children while ripping old letters and flyers, bank statements and bills into tiny squares.
This makeshift confetti will be reconstituted into writing paper and envelopes, and sold by this women’s cooperative. It’s not long before the singing starts again.
This is a cruise but not as we know it. Launched in April last year, Fathom is the 10th company in the global Carnival Corporation behemoth, and its mission is to connect travellers with the communities they visit. The labels used to describe Fathom’s work don’t quite nail it: “impact travel”, “travel that transforms”. Perhaps the more widely accepted “voluntourism” describes it best.
“There’s an emerging and growing hunger for far more than immersion,” says Fathom’s president Tara Russell. “These travellers want to really understand intimately the heart of a place.”
Fathom’s story starts in the Dominican Republic, a Caribbean island nation about 1,200 kilometres southeast of Miami. The average annual household income is less than $6,000, placing more than 40 per cent of the 10.6 million citizens below the poverty line.
Said to have been named by Columbus in the late 15th century when he observed the fog on a mountaintop imparting a silvery reflection on the water, Puerto Plata, the silver port, is Carnival’s gateway to the Republic. In the 1970s the region was renamed the Amber Coast, for some of the world’s richest amber mines. Cruise tourism may be the next saviour. In November 2015 Carnival opened Amber Cove, a $118 million port centre that will deliver up to half a million visitors to the Republic’s north coast this year. The old port had been inactive for almost 30 years, with most cruise tourism focused on Punta Cana, on the east coast.
Fathom works with two well-established community organisations in the Republic, both with a raft of programs under way across the country: Entrena, focused on education, and Instituto Dominicano de Desarrollo Integral (IDDI), focused on community development. As an alternative to a city tour or a zip-line jaunt, passengers on any Carnival cruise line stopping at Amber Cove can choose to
“go deep” by signing up for a Fathom experience, lending a hand to locals in ways that are defined by the communities themselves. Current on-shore activities offered to Carnival passengers include working with arts and crafts cooperative RePapel, which recycles the paper ripped up by women like Marcia and Illuminada into stationery, and lending a hand at organic chocolate cooperative Chocal. More activities are expected to roll out later this year.
Fathom began as a cruise line offering seven-day itineraries from Port Miami to the Dominican Republic on the 704-passenger Adonia. These voyages will end in June, while Fathom will continue to arrange on-shore experiences for its six sister lines that currently operate in the Dominican Republic: Holland America Line, Princess Cruises, Carnival Cruise Line, P&O Cruises (UK), Aida Cruises and Costa Cruises.
“We never intended the Adonia to be the end game,” says Russell. “The way we look at it, we really>
have only written the first half of the first chapter.
It’s very much the beginning of the story.”
About half a million Carnival travellers will visit the Dominican Republic this year, compared to the 17,000 that Adonia could have potentially delivered in the same period. “It gives you a sense of the scale, and the audience that can begin to engage with what we’ve started,” says Russell.
I’m among the passengers on Fathom’s inaugural voyage who roll up sleeves. The highlight for me is my morning at RePapel, in one of the poorer neighbourhoods of Puerto Plata. We spend our morning separating clean and inked paper, each of which will be turned into writing paper and envelopes, and though the work is unremarkable there’s a feeling we’re part of something bigger.
One of my new acquaintances is Katia, a 38-year-old mother of four; she says her work at the cooperative has allowed her to send her eldest to college. We exchange stories in snatches of English and Spanish, and by the end of the session we’ve learnt to make paper and glimpsed another way of life.
Another day, wearing old shoes and wide-brimmed sunhats, we board a bus and bump along colourful Callejón de la Loma, a street lined with colmados – general stores selling everything from household goods and beer to glasses of sugarcane juice and bowls of chilled rice pudding. We’re on our way to plant mangroves at El Choco National Park, 50 kilometres south-east of Amber Cove, near the kite-surfing town of Cabarete. This activity is more about the grunt work than engaging with locals. We spend the morning planting rows of trees with cheerful staff from IDDI, first in a muddy clearing behind the forest, and later in a denuded swamp. About 50 families live in and around the park, and community members are trying to build on unstable ground close to the water. While there’s no doubt we made a difference – 351 mangroves planted in just four hours – the project is being refined to better involve the community before it’s offered to Carnival cruise passengers.
Russell hopes to expand Fathom’s work to a “full buffet”, including activities such as teaching English, producing clay water filters (more than three million people in the Republic have no piped water in their homes) and pouring concrete floors in homes. “We’re going to keep studying the region, and other regions, so that it enhances our travellers’ experience,” she says. “What we don’t want to do is create dependency. We are focused on solutions that are sustainable and empowering, and how you go about approaching these communities is a super-important piece of the puzzle.”
With a background in engineering and business, Russell was new to cruising before Fathom launched. She previously worked at Fortune 500 companies,
Intel and Nike among them, and founded socialimpact ventures including Create Common Good, which provides education, training and employment to refugees in the United States, and NightLight International, which supports women at risk of exploitation in Bangkok. Combining her business nous with an altruistic approach, she floated the idea of “social impact cruises” to Carnival Corporation CEO Arnold Donald a few years ago. Her goal is to make Fathom experiences available across all Carnival brands in a range of destinations.
“I’ve been living this 20-year journey of trying to do good through business in both the non-profit and for-profit space,” says Russell. “It’s complicated to make an impact globally in a social enterprise. You have to be humble enough to realise you’ve got a lot more learning to do, and you don’t have all the answers.”
Fathom’s success will rest on its relationships with the communities it seeks to help – “We’re not just showing up at a place sporadically,” says Russell,
“we have partnerships that have gone long beyond a ship’s visit” – and also the preparation invested in travellers before they arrive at the destination. On Fathom’s inaugural Adonia voyage, during two days at sea en route to the Republic, there were personaldevelopment activities, talks about our destination, being “change-makers” and thinking like “social entrepreneurs”. As the Fathom concept rolls out across>
the company, each Carnival line will refine its own Fathom enrichment programs for passengers.
Ann Sherry, executive chairman of Carnival Australia, has experienced the Fathom concept first hand and she, like Russell, sees it as powerful and portable. “The idea of one destination and one ship was probably too ambitious, but we know the idea works,” she says, “both from a traveller point of view, and also from a community point of view.”
Sherry has brought her credentials as an activist in women’s rights and indigenous development, and a track record in effecting corporate change to a decade in the top role at Carnival Australia (see our profile on Sherry, page 168). She believes travellers, too, want to make a difference. “It’s not enough any more to just take the pictures,” she says. “With a bit of effort, each of us can make a difference – even on holidays.”
Carnival Australia’s fleet is already cruising to Pacific destinations where the company has built strong relationships with communities and the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to ensure its engagement is meaningful and not disruptive. Sherry sees the Fathom model working well in many of those remote communities, such as Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and the Trobriand Islands. “These are places where communities are isolated, and where you can’t get to easily any other way,” Sherry says. “The communities there are hungry for engagement and for people to, in a sense, be advocates for them in a broader world.”
While there’s more than a glimmer of the evangelical about Fathom – Russell says its “heart and ambition is for the world” – at its root is an idea worth watching closely. In just three days in the Dominican Republic, the passengers aboard the Fathom Adonia voyage gave English lessons to 636 people, planted 2,408 trees, made 584 sheets of paper, wrapped 6,320 chocolate bars, produced 50 water filters, and poured the concrete floors of two houses. The couple of hours we spent with a group of Dominican women didn’t change the world, but the value of our gesture, along with that of the group that follows us, and those that come after that, isn’t hard to fathom.