Letter from the Founder | May 2021
Teamwork makes the dream work, and community makes that dream take flight.
Image | Hannah Busing, Unsplash
Welcome to Spring!
Days are getting longer, plants are blooming, and is that the scent of hope in the air? I think it “May” be.
The past year has been hard. Getting through day by day, most of us don’t look at the strain of it all. Personally, I’ve had the roughest couple of years imaginable. When you pile all of the difficulty I’ve dealt with—divorce, job loss, illness, and more, it seems like an insurmountable storm. Maybe you’re experiencing the same things in your life. So how do we get through tough times? For me, it’s been all about community, which is our Guide Collective theme for the month.
Nearly a year ago, I sent out a proposal to my colleagues. We’d learned that we would not be working in Europe, doing the jobs we love with a passion—the future was unclear. What if we worked together to create something that would anchor our days and build a different future? I didn’t expect anyone to respond, to be honest, but the most wonderful group of people answered the call. Some were friends, others I’d never even had a conversation with. From this small beginning, we met every week to create the vision for Guide Collective.
I’m so proud of how far we have all come from our humble beginnings, but the most striking part of our project is the community we have created. Loneliness during this time is at a high point, and even if you have family around you, there is still a sense of isolation. By making a regular appointment to meet with colleagues and work on something new, we’ve given ourselves a lighthouse in the dark.
One of our goals is to include you in our community, to make GC a welcoming space for people with a passion for cultures and travel. No matter what the future holds, this has made all the work worth the effort. I hope we have given you the same sense of fellowship that we all feel.
In the spirit of community, we’ve reached out to our wider guide community. We are a small group of 20, but our network goes far beyond that, to all corners of the world. This month, we will feature the work of friends that you might not have met yet. We hope you’ll enjoy getting to know some new faces and cultures.
We’ll also continue to bring you thoughtful, informative, and inspiring content from our Guide Collective team members, like upcoming articles from Fran Glaría, Susan Brown, Trish Feaster, Susanna Perruchini, Lisa Anderson, and Nina Seffusatti. The trio from Scottish Blethers—the aforementioned Susan, Liz Lister, and Helen Houston—have lots of new podcast episodes for you, and several of our guides like Charlie Rawson have a litany of virtual tours and live events lined up, including two GC Presents dates at the end of the month.
Our community of book- and travel-lovers who form our GC Book Club are in for lots of treats as Jorge Román moderates the May selection, The Pilgrimage by Brazilian author Paolo Coelho. Jorge’s compatriot, Fran, will be providing several pieces of supplemental content to help our readers gain additional insight and understanding about the Camino de Santiago, the route that serves as both a backdrop and focal point for the autobiographical novel.
I am in constant awe of this dedicated group of guides. From the content-producers to the behind-the-scenes crew who manage, edit, and maintain that content for our website and social platforms, they all consistently volunteer their time, talent, and knowledge to help fuel our audience’s passion for travel. They share the histories that help inform and adjust our views, they enlighten us about cultures that fill them with pride, they help us understand art as a means to better understand ourselves and others, and they challenge us to find common humanity, creating community at home and abroad.
On behalf of all of my Guide Collective colleagues-friends-teammates, thank you for being a part of our community. Together, we can keep travel dreams alive and ready for when our next adventure begins.
Andiamo!
Sarah