Gaian Path is a life-path of giving service to Earth's community of universal living beings. Please join us in restoring grace, justice, and beauty to the world.
Symbiosis
Our intention is to travel the world (South America currently) volunteering with community environmental and humanitarian organizations, using our gifts of documentary filmmaking to help their voices be heard.
Objectives:
1. Participate in community-based service projects while traveling to give back to the communities who open their hearts and their homes to us.
2. Create films to spread awareness about the varying challenges facing communities across the Americas and illuminate the efforts being taken to alleviate poverty, suffering, inequalities, oppression, and environmental degradation.
- We are focusing on community based, non-governmental, non-profit, and grassroots projects. Some examples include: organizations that address issues pertaining to human rights, the environment (conservation, rehabilitation, restoration, organic farming), indigenous rights, education, orphans, high-risk youth, women and gender empowerment, fair-trade, micro-financing, eco-tourism and centers focused on spiritual exploration, holistic healing, permaculture, and sustainable living.
3. Spread awareness about ecologically and culturally responsible ways of traveling through hands on volunteering and video documentation.
- Volunteering is not a charity or a service one gives to others; it is an exchange of giving and receiving. Conventional travel is often invasive and detrimental to local economies. In many cases, tourism is an act of taking without giving back. Often times the western approach to traveling –staying in foreign operated hotels (rather than locally owned)-skips over the true beauty of a location and culture. It is important not to forget that we are foreigners in another’s homeland and thus must treat them with the utmost reverence. The only ethical way to travel is by volunteering with communities. In doing so, one breaches through the facade of “culture” glimpsed through bus windows or taxi rides to one’s lavish destination. Living and working with communities opens oneself to real culture, both the hardships and the joys.
4. Use the Internet as a means to publicize non-profit organizations with the intention of attracting sponsors and volunteers to their cause.
5. Encourage international and national volunteering by showing how beneficial and rewarding it feels to serve.
- Serving is the most direct, beneficial, and enlightening exchange one can experience. Both parties create a connection, give and receive, learn and grow. During this exchange one becomes aware of the intriguing differences but more importantly the universal oneness of humankind.
6. Challenge how mainstream society believes life should be lived and challenge ourselves in pursuit of our dreams.
7. Continue exploring paths that allow us to follow our passions and live a life of love and service to our global community (Spirits, Humans, Animals, Environment, and other Wild Things).
8. Influence other human beings to unhinge the shackles tying them down, take action into their own hands, and become progressive, visionary leaders in this global society.
- Ultimately, change begins with a seed inside of a motivated individual. Global change manifests when this seed of desire is watered with encouragement, resources, and success stories of the supposed-impossible. One does not need to wait for opportunities to come along when we have the ability to create our own. People are doing it all over the world. What are you waiting for?
E-mail us at Gaianpath@gmail.com