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Interview with Sam Keller of Working Without Borders

We got the chance to catch up with Sam Keller, an AMIGOS alum and the founder and CEO of Working Without Borders! Working Without Borders offers family retreats around the world focused on authentic connection and cultural learning. Working Without Borders enables parents to work remotely (as needed) during month-long programs in Latin America and the Pacific. Designed to build confidence and broaden horizons, Working Without Borders’s thoughtful and local-first programming was inspired by Sam’s experiences with AMIGOS in Latin America.

Learn more about Working Without Borders here.

working without borders group 1

AMIGOS President & CEO Sara Nathan:

It’s so wonderful to have Sam Keller, CEO of Working Without Borders, and AMIGOS alum, here today. Tell us what you’re up to right now!

Working Without Borders CEO Sam Keller:

I’m doing something that was essentially born of AMIGOS! During the pandemic, my family and I moved to French Polynesia. While there, I conceived of Working Without Borders, a travel company that makes it easy for families to live temporarily in amazing destinations, with an extraordinary community.

Now that more folks are able to work remotely and travel for longer periods of time, we enable them to experience other cultures around the world in a really authentic, immersive, meaningful way. Parents who are able to travel but need to work remotely are able to do so. And they can feel great about what their kids or teens experience while they do. We organize very immersive educational programming with similarly aged local youth. We do this for around 15 families at a time in the programs we run in Latin America and the Pacific.

Sara:

That’s amazing. I recall the first time I heard about your new company and was impressed. It definitely captures the spirit of what AMIGOS is also all about. What does a day in the life of being CEO of Working Without Borders look like?

Sam:

I work on both the supply and demand sides. On the supply side, I’m working with a colleague whose family traveled with us to French Polynesia last year. She assists me in working with partners in Colombia, Peru, Mexico, French Polynesia, and Costa Rica to develop programs. Another part of my day is on the demand side: marketing. In that area, I’m working with another colleague whose family also traveled with us last year. With our spouses and our kids, we all really bonded, we all lived through a pretty magical experience, and we know what kind of programming we want to bring to other parts of the globe. Finally, some of my day is dealing with families who are already booked and getting folks ready for their program.

working without borders group 2Sara:

I love bringing people into leadership of the company who have seen the magic in play, which we often do here at AMIGOS. How did the pandemic impact the way you wanted to live your life and inspire you to start this new mission?

Sam:

Leading up to the pandemic, for over 20 years, my wife and I knew we wanted to live abroad, but we could never figure out how to make it happen until the pandemic set in. That’s ironically when the stars aligned for us. We were able to begin working remotely. We moved with our two kids to the island of Tahiti. Our kids attended the Tahiti International School, right on the lagoon. You could see stingrays swimming by! It was while there that I had the privilege to really think about where my heart and soul were and what I really wanted to do. We could see how the world was evolving, with more people being able to work remotely, and demand becoming pent up for travel, connection, and community. That’s when the idea was born.

Sara:

In starting any new company or organization, there are bound to be lots of challenges. What were some of the biggest challenges you faced?

Sam:

One was Delta, and another was Omicron. I was a bit overly optimistic in terms of how quickly we would get out of the pandemic and the emergence of new variants hindered things. Beyond that, our main challenges are finding the right local partners with the right capabilities, planning the trips, finding the right accommodations for families that have a communal feel, planning programming for kids and teens, and then figuring out how to get the word out to actually enable families who are enthralled by this opportunity. Letting people know about us, that’s no easy feat.

If you’ve got kids, time becomes even more fleeting and precious. I like to make these moments possible for families to share.

sam keller familySara:

You learned how to be nimble, and work very closely with local partners, which is so critical to our work as well. Tell me about your AMIGOS experience. Where did you go and what did you do with AMIGOS?

Sam:

It started for me in Ohio on a cold January day, as I walked across the university campus, freezing my butt off. I saw a poster with this depiction of a tropical location and young people working with others from another culture, and I was drawn to it instantly. That was back in 1992, I became involved with the Kent Chapter, and trained to be a volunteer in Costa Rica in ’92, then a supervisor in Ecuador the following summer, and the next in Guanajuato, Mexico. After that, I was the Project Director for Costa Rica in 1995–1996. I also worked at the international office in Houston as a diversity fellow. I came from a much lower income background and brought socio-economic diversity, and it was and still is very much in my heart to enable AMIGOS to be accessible to a really broad range of young people, racially, ethnically, socially, and economically. Years later, joined the board of directors. That was my most recent involvement.

Sara:

I know it’s hard to draw comparisons, as each AMIGOS experience is so unique, but do you have any salient thoughts on how your AMIGOS experiences were different from one another?

Sam:

The roles I had made the experiences significantly different. Being a volunteer, where you’re living with a family in a community and experiencing another culture—that was probably the most impactful, the quintessential AMIGOS experience. It’s so immersive: you’re living with another family! That was tremendous. Fast forward to being a Project Director, where you’re leading staff and volunteers all over the country. That was a significant leadership experience at a relatively young age.

Sara:

Do you have a favorite story from your time with AMIGOS?

Sam:

One thing comes to mind. I was an AMIGOS volunteer, living with a family near the Nicaraguan border in Costa Rica, in a little town called Los Chiles. Unbeknownst to me, the father was skeptical of how it would work having this young American guy come to live with them—and whether this American guy would be able to hang with him and his mates and be able to handle it for the eight weeks I spent there. As it turns out, when he sought to test me on the very first morning, I had no problem going out into a swampy area and meeting up with all these other guys to go fishing, where we’re trudging through the mud together. It wasn’t just fish we saw; there were big snakes too. I relished it! There was a quick and significant paradigm shift on the part of my host father, and we quickly bonded. We were tight for the whole rest of the time.

Sara:

For those who are alumni that have gone through an AMIGOS experience, everyone carries it forward in a different way. What would you say you’ve carried forward from your experiences with AMIGOS throughout your life?

Sam:

I was bitten by the bug in the sense of not just traveling, but traveling in a way in which you get to be welcomed into another society, another culture, another community, and you get to see your own society, from a very different outside lens. You connect with fellow human beings in a beautiful, meaningful way that you wouldn’t necessarily get to do otherwise. That was so enriching for me. I just felt so alive, even when it was difficult, even when I was out of my comfort zone. Now, fast forward all these years later, I’m getting to build Working Without Borders, which in many ways is AMIGOS for families.

It was all those different experiences with AMIGOS, including working at the headquarters and being on the board, that gave me exposure to how you safely and competently run and build an organization that gets young people into Latin America. I just thought, my gosh, if AMIGOS can do it for the young people who are traveling without their parents, we can do it for the young people with their parents, and give the parents the opportunity to go along. If you’ve got kids, time becomes even more fleeting and precious. I like to make these moments possible for families to share.

I was bitten by the bug in the sense of not just traveling, but traveling in a way in which you get to be welcomed into another society, another culture, another community, and you get to see your own society, from a very different outside lens. You connect with fellow human beings in a beautiful, meaningful way that you wouldn’t necessarily get to do otherwise.

sam keller and family 2Sara:

A big part of leading a travel organization like this is getting the word out. As some people have always said, AMIGOS is the best-kept secret. Why don’t more people know about AMIGOS and what would you hope they learn about it?

Sam:

My perception is that at the core of AMIGOS is a real focus on building and running programs: figuring out the destinations, partners, host families, and activities, and getting that done professionally and safely. That’s not to say that the organization doesn’t have good marketing capabilities, which I’ve seen strengthen over the years. I just think that other organizations or companies might prioritize the branding and the buzz and the sizzle. I think the DNA of AMIGOS is about planning and executing programs. Even with all these thousands of passionate alums like myself, it’s still challenging to make everyone aware who could benefit from AMIGOS, even with the tremendous word of mouth that occurs.

I should mention that during the past few years, my niece and nephew have each done AMIGOS and they’ve been affected profoundly, just as I was decades ago. We all spread the word. But there are a lot of people out there, and it’s hard to reach everyone unless you’ve got a huge budget.

Sara:

Our history has been and continues to be focused on running high-quality programming, and our team is avidly working to get the word out now. But if you don’t know about the opportunity, you can’t choose it. Thinking about travel more broadly, how has traveling changed since the onset of the pandemic? What changes do you hope to see?

Sam:

Since the onset of the pandemic, I’ve seen people traveling for different reasons than before, including the fact that they’re able to work remotely. I see people traveling for longer durations because of that ability. In addition to a vacation, they can plan a bit of work as well. Through our own operations and the networks that we’re part of, such as the Transformational Travel Council, people travel because of a desire to really connect with other folks, to have an adventure, to travel in a way that enables them to be part of a community, and in ways that can be more immersive and more transformational.

Sara:

Working Without Borders has a very specific intent, which is fostering the ability for families to connect with the place they’re traveling to and build relationships across cultures. This can be very challenging. What makes immersive travel responsible? How do you run programs in a way that doesn’t do harm?

Sam:

At the top of the list is who we work with locally. We vet prospective local partners to find those that share our vision of what it means to have an authentic experience. We need to ensure that the funds that come in stay local and that the partners we work with have a high standard for safety and environmental practices. How do we steward the environment during the trips? These are the concepts we consider when building programs.

Sara:

How should families distinguish between Working Without Borders and other travel opportunities?

Sam:

One differentiator for us is that we put time and effort to involve locals in the educational programming for young people. When families come on our programs, it’s not just expat kids getting to do all of these hands-on activities and field trips—there are local kids of similar ages involved as well. Local involvement is a real key thing for us. Likewise, the community of families who come on our trips aren’t necessarily like-minded in every respect—we come from many different societies and backgrounds—but we all have shared core values.

People travel because of a desire to really connect with other folks, to have an adventure, to travel in a way that enables them to be part of a community, and to travel in ways that can be more immersive and more transformational.

Sara:

There’s a lot of alignment with AMIGOS around offering local community members the opportunity to have this type of experience as well, in their home communities or elsewhere. And AMIGOS has been working for some years to really do the same thing, such that we’re really living up to our name of Amigos de las Américas. If you were talking to a family, what would you say to those parents about why it’s so important for their children to have the kind of hands-on, immersive cross-cultural experience?

Sam:

I would say to them that it’s going to bring more confidence. It’s going to broaden the kids’ horizons in terms of what they understand to be possible in the world and what’s possible for themselves and their families. It’s going to deepen the family bonds. It’s going to create intense, lifelong positive memories. It’s going to ignite new friendships, some of which can wind up being lifelong. There’s research showing that when kids spend time in other cultures, it helps their judgment and decision-making because they’re able to see things from other perspectives. It’s going to help those kids to become global citizens.

Sara:

Absolutely. Finally, what makes you hopeful for the future?

Sam:

What makes me hopeful for the future is that, despite everything we hear about how so many of us (adults and kids included) are addicted to our screens, I’ve seen firsthand the hunger, openness, and interest of these young people for culturally immersive experiences. I’ve seen how kids, though perhaps intimidated at first to be in a new society, push through and connect in beautiful ways.

Ultimately, I’m hopeful about how these experiences benefit both the local youth and the visiting youth. I’ve seen them stay in touch for months thereafter, and what they say in terms of the longer-lasting effects on them. In some ways, it’s easier interacting with some of these younger folks than their parents in the sense that some parents can find it somewhat stressful traveling as a family and figuring out how to live in another culture. Sometimes, young people roll even more smoothly with the process of integrating into another culture.

Sara:

That’s an interesting point. Learning about another culture and across differences is exciting and also challenging. That can be very disruptive and hard, as you’re making that leap, and there are going to be highs and lows, but I hadn’t thought about the way that youth would be a part of facilitating that experience for the rest of their family.

Sam:

We want our programs to be formative for young people. So, it can’t just be easy and fun and pleasurable the whole time. There needs to be some challenge that’s overcome. Communicating that and managing that with the families is an interesting aspect of all this.

Sara:

It’s amazing to see the AMIGOS spirit at work in Working Without Borders. I certainly can’t wait to see what’s next.

Sam:

Thank you so much, Sara. It’s profoundly inspiring how you and your team have navigated through the pandemic and brought this organization back to where it’s now flourishing in whole new ways.

 

Want to find out more about Working Without Borders? Explore their 2023 programs here.

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