Experience MexECO

Experience MexECO (UK) and Experience MexECO Tours (Mexico) are both owned and managed by British Zoologist, Ruth Hazlewood, and British Marine Biologist, Daniel Patman.

In the UK, the kind of company we run is often labeled as a ‘gap year’ or ‘year out’ company, implying that the projects we offer are aimed at young people wanting to spend their gap year or sabbatical on a worthwhile project abroad. Young people do this for several reasons:

To gain experience in their field of study and improve their curriculum vitae
To gain independence through traveling to another country and experiencing a different culture to their own
To learn a foreign language
To support a project which they see as a good cause (often in the form of conservation or community projects)

The Experience MexECO – Experience MexECO Tours partnership does indeed provide each of the above for not only young students, but also for people wanting to take a break from their career, or just wanting a ‘holiday with a difference’. The difference between this partnership and larger, well known gap year companies is that we operate on a much smaller scale, but focus much more on the needs of our projects.

Volunteers recruited outside of Mexico by Experience MexECO are met on arrival in Puerto Vallarta or Guadalajara where they begin their stay as an Experience MexECO Tours volunteer. They take part in either sea turtle conservation or community projects (the latter includes supporting English or special needs teachers in rural schools and/or fundraising for a local children’s charity), and are supervised throughout their stay by Experience MexECO staff.

Each volunteer that supports an Experience MexECO project does so in several ways:

By providing physical support in the field
By paying a fee to Experience MexECO, from which a percentage is donated towards the project in question
By spreading the word about our work and making more people aware of the needs of such conservation and community projects

The fee paid by each volunteer not only includes a donation to their project, but also covers his/her accommodation and food costs whilst volunteering and goes towards the development of Experience MexECO, allowing us to begin to support more projects in the future.

The policy of Experience MexECO is to get volunteers where they are needed, when they are needed. Volunteers are never sent to take part in a programme when there is no work to be done; in fact volunteers and their payments have been turned down due to application to take part during the wrong time of the year (sea turtle conservation). When there is work to be done, Experience MexECO staff will fulfil the roles of the volunteers themselves when no volunteers are available (fundraising for ‘Ayuda a los Niños’ 2005/06).