A two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning National Geographic foreign correspondent, Paul Salopek is retracing the 21,000-mile-long pathways of humanity’s first migration out of Africa and around the globe…. on foot, as our ancestors traveled.
His journey is called Out of Eden Walk.
In January 2013, Paul walked out of the Ethiopian Rift Valley. He has since traversed Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel, the West Bank, Cyprus, Turkey, and crossed the Caucasus Mountains into the Republic of Georgia. Paul will continue the Out of Eden Walk trail until he reaches the tip of South America, where our ancestors also ran out of new horizons.
The Abundance Foundation has been a major partner of the Out of Eden Walk project since before Paul Salopek took his first steps out of Ethiopia. This journey has the potential to connect each of us to our own community and to one other — if we slow down and immerse ourselves in the themes of the walk.
Out of Eden Walk just concluded a successful Kickstarter campaign this Wednesday, having surpassed both the initial goal and stretch goal for funding—raising $51, 880 with 542 backers! The Abundance Foundation is proud to have helped the campaign reach these goals with a $15,500 matching funds offer.
From Paul Salopek:
You have rolled up your sleeves. You have shouldered a pack. You have inspired and empowered the Walk’s key mission of global education for another year. Your generosity has made it possible to share the Walk’s slow observation methods with hundreds if not thousands of journalism and science and students at universities across the United States. You have funded free workshops that teach the public the power and beauty of mapping our lives using online tools (these mapping seminars will be offered live and on the Web). You have dismantled the barriers of language by allowing us to vastly improve our translation outreach.
The Abundance Foundation has been a crucial partner on this journey. By matching your donations, they leveraged our community’s generosity to achieve funding success.
In addition to partnering with Out of Eden Walk, the Abundance Foundation created the Out of Eden Learn educational platform in partnership with Project Zero, a research institute at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. In this unique online learning community, more than 10,000 students in 700 classrooms in 40 countries engage with Paul’s journey and all that it represents. For more info, or to sign your classroom up to participate for free, please visit their website and check out the video below!