By Nicholas Lee
July 8, 2020, THAILAND—Global Peace Foundation and the Pacific Asia Travel Association co-organized an online webinar to showcase models of how peacebuilding and tourism intersect in reality. The event was held in conjunction with the PATA Dream to Travel Festival and attracted more than 100 attendees from across the Asia and Pacific region to participate in the webinar as well as hundreds of live broadcast views through Facebook.
The webinar outlined tourism businesses in the local communities and how they bring about different forms of peace. The inspiring stories shared online are a demonstration of how helpful it is to establish some perspective of cultural understanding as a peacebuilder.
This webinar was moderated and led by Aletheia Tan, Youth Ambassador of PATA, and featured two prominent guest speakers: Michael Biedassek, the Founder of Bangkokvanguards based in Thailand and Thryza Dow, the CEO of the BlincVentures a leading social enterprise platform in Nepal.
Michael Biedassek shared the importance of engaging the people in local communities in the process of designing travel experiences through places, stories, and ideas that connect travelers and locals while establishing a perspective of deeper cultural understanding as a process of peacebuilding.
Thryza Dow highlighted successful case studies of empowering young entrepreneurs in breaking poverty circles through social enterprise innovative models. She also shared an ongoing online business incubating program ‘Udhyami Yuva Challenge’ which is a collaborative project with Global Peace Foundation Nepal to provide business training and ongoing support for local communities.
The presentations were followed by an engaging panelist discussion session moderated by Nicholas Lee, the Secretary-General of the Global Peace and Development Service Alliance to reaffirm the essential role of young people in becoming peacebuilders in the tourism industries as well as travelers themselves.
Missed the live session? Don’t worry. The recorded webinar is for you to watch the REPLAY here.
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