10 years

10 years.

On September 15th, 2015, we boarded a plane to Thailand, beginning our multi-stages journey around the world. A journey full of adventures, changemakers, experimenting with exchange and other forms of economy. Discovering new places and new people. And rediscovering ourselves. A journey through Southeast Asia, the Balkans, Turkey and the Caucasus, South America, Sri Lanka, India, Morocco and many European countries, especially during and after the pandemic. However, the pandemic and the years since have changed the nature of this journey, and for some time now, we've been reflecting on and discussing: what is ExChange The World today? The 10th anniversary seems like a good time to try to answer this question.

For many years, we defined ExChange The World as a journey around the world in search of changemakers. After a year or two of travel, we created our motto, expressing our mission – Create your Story, Change the World. And we feel that our mission, our "Why," has not changed. We still want and contribute to spaces where, on the one hand, people can discover and create their own stories—by working with their values, strengths, and dreams, by getting to know themselves, developing skills, and building self-esteem—and, on the other, engage their talents, resources, and energy in changing the world for the better. In fact, all our activities and projects focus on personal development, social engagement, sustainability, building communities, creating safe spaces, and changing the world. We still tell the stories of changemakers and look for them in the places we visit, although meetings are less often in the form of structured interviews. We no longer travel around the world, at least not in the way we did for the first seven years. In a sense, while the "Why" remains the same, our "How" has changed. Instead of traveling around the world, we live in an ecovillage, an intentional community. "Live" is a big word – a large part of our lives are still international training and projects, so it's hard to say we've stopped traveling, but it's a different kind of movement. And a large portion of our energy is focused on developing the community and the world of ecovillages, which we've recognized as a changemaking alternative worthy of our time and energy. Why? 

We've written a bit about this in a series of posts about communities, and we'll write more soon. For now, however, we want to transparently share with you this change, this shift in our How. Is this a permanent change, the end of traveling around the world? We don't know. At the beginning of our project, many people asked us how long we intended to travel. And we’ve always answered that we will travel till we change our minds or till this traveling makes sense. Today, the answer is essentially the same: we will live in the community and continue to follow this road until we change our minds or/and until it makes sense. 

We are still motivated by being together, creating our own story, and changing the world for the better. Even if our daily lives look completely different today than they did 10 years ago. ExChange The World is our adventure, one of the ways to fulfill our life mission, a transformative answer to the question—what can we do to leave this world better than we found it? And we don't seek this answer alone. ExChange The World, or rather we—Anna and Andrea—are part of various movements, groups, and organizations that ask themselves similar questions. Because only together we can truly make a difference.