About Learn from Travel
We are a social enterprise.
A social enterprise is a business that has a social mission, beyond just generating profit. Our social mission is to enrich the traveler and the host. We want our study abroad students and other travelers to walk away with a new perspective on the world, and we want our host communities to generate additional income for their own sustainable development. In addition to paying for lodging, meals, activities, and projects directly to people in our host communities, we often support local nonprofit organizations and initiatives.
Working with rural entrepreneurs like edwin sanchez in Panama’s remote northern mountains is the key to our social enterprise
Our founder is a lifelong traveler.
From childhood summers on the Baltic Sea, to a career-changing study abroad program in South America, to research on sustainable tourism in Nicaragua on a Fulbright Grant, Roman Yavich has dedicated his life and career to sustainable travel, international education, and community development. Before founding Learn from Travel, Roman co-founded Comunidad Connect, a non-profit raising funds for rural development through tourism. Roman has lived abroad in Ukraine, Chile, Argentina, Nicaragua and Panama and has traveled extensively throughout Latin America, Europe, and the Caribbean.
Roman Yavich meets Don José Ángel Zapata on a visit to Finca El pensamiento in Colombia
We were born from a vision of sustainable, community-based study abroad.
By 2017 Roman had been working in Nicaragua for over 10 years on projects that leveraged tourism to support sustainable community development. One of the most important places he had a chance to visit was a small rural community called Sontule in the Nicaraguan highlands. There he worked with Nuevo Amanacer, a small women’s cooperative that started with nothing. The women invested a small loan from a local organization into beds and spare rooms in their very humble homes. Over time, people interested in bird watching and students interested in service learning began arriving to stay with these families. The women invested income from hospitality services to buy land and began to grow organic coffee. They built a meeting space separate from the meeting space used by men’s agricultural cooperatives. They even started a scholarship fund to send their children to college, some of the first people to do so from Sontule. The women were empowered socially by their economic progress, and now Sontule is unlike any place in rural Nicaragua. The story of the Nuevo Amanacer women’s cooperative was driven by community-based tourism and study-abroad. Roman had the privilege to bring more than 10 groups of students to Sontule over the years and was inspired to replicate the success of this community. Learn from Travel is the result of this inspiration. We work to support rural people throughout Latin America, and eventually throughout the world, in pursuing their own visions based on entrepreneurship, leading to a higher quality of life.
Some of the members of the Nuevo Amanecer Women’s cooperative in sontule, Nicaragua
