Fukai Kankei Taiken – Travel is life-changing.
Fukai Kankei Taiken, Inc. is a non-profit corporation whose core mission includes a commitment to provide life-changing cultural travel experiences to young people regardless of the financial resources their family brings to the table.
Fukai Kankei’s founder designed a program that ran at the Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston for 12 years, bringing 120+ under-resourced youth through a transformative travel experience in Japan. This program was funded by a generous private family foundation, and families paid nothing for their child to participate. Over those 12 years, the impact on those youth was massive. 100% finished high school and pursued college or military service. Participants have gone on to impressive achievements in and out of their academic careers, and most credit the Japan Program experience with much of that success.
Buy-One-Give-One on a grand scale.
Fukai Kankei Taiken is built on a different funding model. Since the mid-2000s, “Buy One Give One” became a popular marketing tactic for consumer products like shoes and sunglasses, but with an integrated charitable benefit. “Buy this pair of shoes, and we’ll give a pair of shoes to a person who needs them.” While shoes or a pair of sunglasses are nice to have, they will not create life-altering social change for the individual who receives them. Most B1G1 efforts have the additional ethical difficulties of using manufacturing and supply chain practices like child labor and unfair labor practices to produce the donated goods.
Fukai Kankei aims to take B1G1 to another level, with life-changing effect. The organization works with local social service agencies to identify under-resourced youth for whom this experience would be a game-changer. We fund their opportunity by offering the same opportunity to those who can afford it. When you buy a life changing trip for yourself, through our Stewardship Journey – or for your child through our Summer Semester in Japan, your purchase also supports a youth who would otherwise never have access to the privilege and life-changing experience of meaningful international travel and close cultural experiences.