While travel is, according to good ole Mark Twain, “fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness,” –the travel/vacation landscape is changing.

As lots of folks adjust to living with a little less, the more it calls attention to those who are even less fortunate.  There are so many people in dire need of a helping hand, that volunteer vacations are an emerging trend. Beyond that, families are taking their own broods on life transforming trips, in efforts to raise more socially conscious children. According to the New York Times, organizations like Experience Mission, which arranges Christian mission trips around the world, estimates that 50 percent of the 3,000 to 4,000 volunteers who travel with this 10-year-old organization each year are now families.

Vacation doesn’t have to be about relaxing; it may actually soothe your mind and conscious to make a difference instead, plus you’ll surely experience culture and people in ways you never could from a lounge chair.

Websites like Volunteer Guidewill help you navigate through a bevy of volunteer options.  Whether it be saving chimps from extinction or building a school in a developing nation, there is something for everyone.

Volunteer build-sites like Habitat for Humanity are as popular as ever, and through Global Village work trips you can travel abroad to expand your horizons.  In January of 2013 they are organizing a trip to Ghana. In November of this year, you could be lending your hand and hammer in Cambodia.

Me to We is a company that calls themselves “a social enterprise with a mission.”  Among their trips offered, (which include both youth and adult volunteer trips) is the Bogani Cottages in Kenya, where families and singles alike will work alongside Maasai/Kipsigi community members as they help to build a new school for the community.

-Arianna Schioldager