ITC—International Travelers Club

ITC was started in 2014 with the intention of providing students in the Memphis community a chance to see what else the world has to offer. I started it after working in an inner city school that only made the news when negative things happened in the community.

I did not quite know what I was getting myself into but went ahead with it anyways. After a meal out with some colleagues and broaching the idea to them I did some research and within a few days I found a travel company and a destination.

Now, I had to determine which students and how we would fund raise the money as my student's families definitely did not have the means or funds to pay for a trip, such as this, themselves. Based on the students I had taught and other teachers' recommendations we finished with a group of nine students for our first trip in 2014, which took us to Barcelona and Madrid, Spain. We had three teachers, my parents and a family friend who all attended the trip with us. We joined two other groups for an eight day trip to Spain.

Let's keep this in mind that NONE of my nine students had ever flown on a plane before this trip. NONE of them had a suitcase before the trip and most hadn't been further than a couple hours from their homes. We encountered many struggles and push back from our community. Most people were happy for us and wished us luck. We had others who would constantly ask me, "Why these kids?" This statement always motivated me to do more as why shouldn't these kids get the same opportunities their more affluent peers can have? We had many supporters our first year and ended up raising $39,000 to send these nine deserving students on this trip of a lifetime.

Upon return from Spain most of us had the travel bug and wanted to do another one. We decided that we would look into a more financially reasonable trip as we had less time to fund raise. We chose Costa Rica as it would be a completely new experience from Spain and also about $1,000 less a person. For this trip we took five students, three chaperones and my family friend attended as well. We had 10 glorious days in the rainforest and despite some poor weather, at times, got to experience zip lining and white water rafting. We raised $24,000 for this trip which brings our two year total to $63,000.

I then changed schools and we took a few years off before I decided that we could do another trip. This time we had set out for London, Paris and Rome over spring break of 2018. We took three students with us and raised another $12,000 for this trip. This brings our three trip total to $75,000. This is truly amazing when you take into account that we had very few large donations and it was mainly through doing many small events that generated money each time.

I again changed schools and decided to do another trip which we have planned for spring break 2021 which will take students to Barcelona, France and Italy. We are still working through who will be traveling with us. We are always looking for supporters who can help with passports, suitcases, overall trip costs.