Jordan Ashley - "NGO's, Nonprofits, and Travel with Purpose"

I know a lot of people right now who are still doing them in a way that's working for them.

Like, some folks I know are really, their whole thing is doing a couple retreats a year.

They got, like, a core group of folks who are doing it with them.

And I just, I've been thinking about whether I should try to organize some travel.

I know some of you out there have emailed me and said, "Hey, if you come to my town, I'll come," and I, I miss that, you know.

I spent a lot of years of my life...

Long-time listeners remember I was recording podcasts from, like, hotel rooms [chuckles] over the last 10 years if you remember.

Plenty of times I was traveling all around, and it was always, you know, a beautiful thing to come together with people that I had connected with, either through the show or in other ways.

But it's been a really long time.

I can't even remember.

A couple years now since I last did it.

And there's a lot of different reasons why I think I haven't.

Part of it is that a lot of the travel I did in years back in the times before the pandemic, they were hosted gigs.

Somebody would reach out to me and invite me to come, you know, whether it was, like, TriYoga in London or, you know, I had gigs at Kripalu where I'd do, like, five days there, or I had a couple years I did, like, the Feathered Pipe Branch with, like, seven-day, like, retreat gigs.

But in all those instances, I didn't have to, like, organize stuff.

Those were, like, retreat places that had their own programming, and they were, like, contracting with me to come and do a program there.

There was a while, you'll remember, where I kind of soured on being hosted, because after a few years of doing a particular spot, you would kind of get through their email lists [chuckles] and it was starting to feel like I was bringing more of the people to the workshop than, like, the host centers were.

But I wasn't always making that much money, and if you didn't get enough people, then the numbers didn't always seem to work so great, depending.

So at some point, I just started booking, like, living room tours, where I was just, like, finding people who had a space or, like, even, like, a big enough living room where we could move some furniture, and we would get, like, seven to 10 people in the room.

And just seven to 10 people in a space that I got for free or for very little, I would make more money than if I was doing, like, you know, like a gig at some other big center when there was, like, 30 people.

I was making more with, like, 10 people doing it on my own.

So I was organizing.

But in that case, I was doing, like, a weekend where you do two sessions on Saturday and two sessions on Sunday, and they were just, like, intensive.

These were, like, education.

They weren't retreats where, like, I'm finding an exotic location in Costa Rica or whatever, and then there's also, like, other activities like, you know, parasailing or whatever else, [chuckles] surfing or whatever else people are organizing on these retreats, you know.