Practice English Speaking&Listening with: Visit.org Founder & CEO Michal Alter Speaks at United Nations CSW60

Thank you UN women and thank you to the Israeli delegation for inviting

me to join today and especially I want to thank Christine and Maxine and

Kukula and Maiir, for taking such great leadership positions, in promoting women

in the economy. This is the truly inspiring event for me and for people in

my generation and the next generations and I'm very very honored and humbled to

be here today but also excited to see what comes next to all of us. So I was

asked by the organizers to share a little bit more of my personal story

with you today before I talk more about visit.org. I would like to share two

stories from my life that led me to start visit.org, which is a

for-profit business that's going to make the world a better place. I grew up

with three brothers two older and one younger. When we were kids my dad had

various health issues, so my brothers and I developed a coping mechanism that was

to stick together no matter what. The greatest lesson I learned during my

childhood was that though life can seem intolerable sometimes, they have got my

back no matter what. My brothers have always been my secret weapon as I got

older I often found myself in male-dominated environments. In high

school I took the highest level math, physics, and computer programming classes.

I became one of the first female pilot cadets in the Israeli Air Force. I was

one of very few women in my computer science undergrad class at the Israeli

Institute of the technology, the Technion. and then I entered the high-tech

professional world where men were just everywhere. As the founder of a social

impact start of today and constantly pitching in front of male

investors, we are often the only women led company in the room. I'm very

privileged to have people like my brothers in my life who believed in me

and in my ability to succeed regardless of my gender. Many women and girls around

the world are not so lucky to be believed in like that or even have the

right to pursue their dreams. So it's people like my brothers who are constant

source of strength and support and who dare to challenge convention who are

changing the world today and we need more champions like them. In summer 2008

I was working at a local nonprofit in Tel Aviv with refugees from the four

South Sudan in Eritrea i first started as a volunteer and then to took on a

director position there. The nonprofit did advocacy work in the Israeli

Parliament managed urgent operations of food shelter and healthcare for the

hundreds of refugees that arrived every day and developed several long term

sustainable programs to improve individual and community well-being. This

nonprofit I found was for these refugees the champion that I found in my

brother's throughout my life. After giving birth to my first child, my

refugee friends and my friends from elsewhere in Tel Aviv met one another

for the first time when they came over to my apartment with baby gifts. <y

friends from the two worlds were living in neighborhoods that were just five

minutes away from each other but never had a chance to have a genuine relaxed

human interaction until that day. It was a very powerful encounter. I created

visit.org to allow these interactions to happen much more frequently.

On visit.org you can book immersive impactful in-person visit opportunities hosted by

nonprofit around the globe. There are thousands of

nonprofits and community-based tourism projects around the world that offer

unique travel experiences and use the revenue from these activities to invest

back in programs that benefit the local community. But I bet most of you haven't

heard of them before, have you? Why? Because it's extremely hard to compete

in the seven trillion dollar online travel industry, especially if you're a

small organization in such a highly fragmented market with very limited

resources. So what we do at visit.org is very simple. We help these amazing

projects be discovered and easily bookable online by featuring them on a

centralized marketplace and helping travelers reach them. Let me give you

some examples on visit.org you can book experiences such as make your own coffee

with farmers in Guatemala and proceeds will support the local farmers. You can

spend a day with your family preparing a meal with a local family in Vietnam. You

can shadow scientists in a biodiversity research institution in the Amazons in

the jungle for three days and fans will support and further their research. So we

do not include any type of volunteer or service work in these activities and

this is very important. The local communities we work with are the ones

sharing from their own skills, history, culture and expertise with the visitors.

We've already reached hundreds of nonprofits offering some of the most

amazing experiences out there. Currently ten organization and week staff register

on our platform because the demand is so high we have clear vetting criteria and

system is in place to ensure the quality of the experiences as well as the impact

of our partner organizations. Potential partners must demonstrate a track record

of positive impact and must agree to invest revenue generated from visit.org

tours into programs that benefit the local community. We have a team

around the world and by now we have dozens and almost hundreds of community

members around the world of local representatives who help us identify

that and on board our partner organizations and a growing community of

ambassadors that go and pilot visits to ensure quality and safety. We provide our

partner organizations with unlimited free support on building programs that

are attractive and safe to travellers, helping them deciding on price

points. They usually all and always underprice their products and making

sure that they run these programs so they are profitable for them and

that they benefit the local community. So why is this innovation so powerful?

Because by opening the doors of nonprofits to millions of visitors from

around the world, we promote economic development by generating sustainable

and revenue streams to local organization. In just under a year, we

just started generating revenue to our partner organizations and degenerated

50k. In five years from now we plan to for them to generate three hundred

million dollars in earned revenue. We also encourage the public education and

what we've been seeing so far is it thirty percent of visitors become

longtime supporters of visited nonprofits and we enhance the missions

of great organizations. Our goal is to get to 50,000 organization connected put

them on the grid by 2020 and this is just the first milestone once we reach

that milestone and we get these thousands of organizations around the

world that cannot do it on their own get them on a centralized marketplace then

the opportunities for them are just endless. So this is really where our

vision lies. I invite you to join our global movement, so we can all have each

other's back. Thank you!

thank you what a display of different experiences, insights, advice, thoughts,

visions, that we have heard from our speakers, and this last project that you

presented to us Michal, and thinking how well it lends itself to women's

nonprofits and that type of local tourism that could be an entry point

much easier for many women in the tourism industry, than the

bigger more formalized tourism projects.