About Us

Walking Alongside, Not Ahead

Our Mission

We have always believed in the power of travel — not simply for the joy of connection and sharing of culture, but as a driver of internal change and creating good in the world.

Ensuring access to education for all, empowering girls and women and helping reduce human and wildlife conflict are some of our key areas of impact. When we walk alongside a community first, travel there is all the richer.

Our custom itineraries connect visitors as travelers, not tourists, offering access to local friends, experts and projects that give back to local communities and conservation needs.

In September 2025, we became official partners of the Utopia Foundation 501c3. With their help, and through your fundraising and project support, we continue walking alongside global changemakers and community visionaries to find real, sustainable solutions to locally identified problems. Together, we journey deep and connect wide.

Kim and Tanja with local African children

Walking Alongside, Not Ahead

Kim Schneider

Kim Schneider is an award-winning travel writer and former journalism instructor with a gift for crafting an itinerary that leaves you with a story to tell. Kim's travels around the world (and now the trips she leads) focus on authentic connection—with the people, the places, and even the elephants. When she first visited Kenya several years ago, she found herself feeling at home among both its wildlife and people. That feeling and the way she saw how far a little help could go led her to found a charity focused on food and water security in this drought-prone land as well as sustainable projects for women. She serves on the board of the Inzeku Education Foundation, a project that uplifts, educates and provides medical care for some 60 needy children in a malaria-prone region of Western Kenya. The Mara projects focus more specifically on educating girls in a society that, while in transition, still forces them into early marriage and genital mutilation. The community assistance has integrated our team into the culture as if we were natives, a fact that also has our guests similarly welcomed as family. Her two Maasai names, Namelok (sweet one) and Noongishu (mother of cows!) both have back stories she can't wait to share.

Kim Schneider, Co-Founder

Tanja Wittrock

Tanja Wittrock has been a practicing veterinarian for 24 years, teaching at the university level for most of that time and earning a “Legend of the Year” award from the American Association of Equine Practitioners. Tanja's vocation and avocation, both, focus on improving lives of all living beings. She has a passion for travel and weaving into her trips her interests in science, teaching and the uplifting of marginalized people and animals. Her passion for helping children was fueled by time spent with Safe Passage, a grassroots effort to help provide education to young people living and surviving off what they could forage within Guatamala's infamous garbage dump. She built on that work as a board member of the school Vida, where she supports Guatamala's only inclusive school for the disabled and poor. Tanja was recently recruited by a top animal welfare organization to inspect animal sanctuaries in particularly destitute areas of India. But her heart remains in the far more uplifting elephant sanctuaries the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust runs in Kenya and to which many of our trips venture. The elephants similarly seem to have fallen for this woman the Maasai named Naishipai, or joyous one.

Tanja Wittrock, Co-Founder

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