AARP Passport Partners' Good Works

By: Joe Volz | Source: AARP.org | October 24, 2007

You may already know about the member benefits offered by AARP Passport providers Untours, Collette Vacations and SeaWorld & Busch Gardens. These companies also serve as philanthropic forces aiding the less fortunate and helping to conserve the planet’s natural resources. Here’s a sampling of what they do.

Untours

Hal Taussig, a former college professor, started Untours 33 years ago after spending a sabbatical year in Europe. Living in a rented cottage made him and his wife Norma “feel like residents” in the community, he says.

After leaving teaching, he started Untours so others could experience “the same enriching” foreign travel. Untours specializes in providing tourists with private, furnished vacation rental packages in Italy, France, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Greece, and Holland, among other countries. But the Media, Pa. company does more than just provide enriching tourism. It watches out for the environment, too, using only renewable energy to run its offices.

But that’s not all Hal and his wife, Norma, who live on Social Security and a small pension, do to help. All company profits are plowed into the company’s foundation. Started in 1992, the foundation grew out of Hal’s “concern about the gap between rich and poor,” he says.

The Foundation’s goal is “to get capital to poor people,” Hal says. In Brazil, for example, the foundation funded a workers’ movement to move landless people onto their own land. About a million people in the country now are land owners, Hal notes.

Closer to home, Untours donated $150,000 to the Home Care Associates in Philadelphia. Home Care Associates "provides funding to move women off of welfare and into positions" where they provide superior care to home bound clients, Taussig said. Philadelphia nurses established the program to provide the women training for the positions.

Three years ago, Taussig’s Untours approached AARP to become a member of the AARP Passport program. As an Passport provider, Untours frequently offers special discounts to members who want to travel abroad and all AARP members receive a 'welcome home' basket upon their return.

For more information, visit:

• AARP Passport: Untours
• Untours

Collette Vacations

Begun in 1918 by Jack Collette, the tour business initially organized trips by motor coach taking New Englanders to Florida to escape winter weather for $61.50. Since 1964, the Sullivan family has owned Collette Worldwide tours.

Today, Collette tours go to European countries, Australia, China, Africa, Mexico and Antarctica. All trips focus on giving travelers insights into a country’s history, culture and entertainment.

Involved in philanthropic efforts since the 1970s, the company more than 10 years ago organized the Alice I. Sullivan Foundation (AIS) that to date “has given $4 million dollars to education, cancer research and to help children and the elderly,” says public relations director Nicole Sullivan. It funds local projects and also humanitarian groups.

AIS currently provides funding to projects to build schools, provide school supplies, uniforms and blackboards, and other projects to improve the lives of children world-wide.

A new foundation, started in 2007, the Collette Foundation, is a 5-year, $2 million initiative that in 2007 funds projects in the United States as well in Kenya, China and South Africa.

An AARP Passport member, Collette offers discounted travel to AARP members. The tours go to all seven continents and include escorted tours, cruise-land vacations and romantic honeymoon packages.

Collette experts travel to each location and sample the entertainment for character, charm and fun along with checking out accommodations and meals that offer an authentic experience of the areas on the tour itineraries.

For more information, visit:

• AARP Passport: Collette Vacations
• Collette Vacations

SeaWorld & Busch Gardens

For 50 years, SeaWorld & Busch Gardens Adventure Parks have engaged in conservation efforts to protect wildlife and habitats and to care for animals as well as to fund research, education and environmental protection. The company has given $3.5 million to fund 250 projects in 50 countries, says Virginia Busch.

She is president of the Company, whose first adventure park opened in 1959, and its SeaWorld & Busch Gardens Conservation Fund, established in 2003. Among the fund’s goals is to educate people about the longstanding history of animal conservation and ocean literacy.

SeaWorld’s project with Pacific loggerhead sea turtles started by fitting three loggerhead sea turtles with satellite tracking devices and then releasing them off the Pacific Coast in 2000.The turtles had lived at SeaWorld San Diego for 20 years. The goal was to track where the turtles go on their trek to Japan to nest. Previously it had been difficult to study the turtles away from their nesting colonies where they spend 90 percent of their time.

The Conservation Fund sets aside $100,000 annually to assist emergency projects involving wild life. A 2007 project gave funds to protect endangered mountain gorillas in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“Crisis situations, whether natural or human-caused, don’t neatly occur at the peak of our grant-making cycle,” Virginia Busch explains. “With our Animal Crisis Response grants, however, the Fund is able to take immediate action to help wildlife in need.”

SeaWorld & Busch Gardens became an AARP Passport member about three years ago. When members present their membership cards at the adventure parks, they receive discounts, with the most valuable discounts allocated to “Terrific Tuesdays.”

Adventure parks are in San Diego, Orlando and San Antonio while Busch Gardens are in Tampa Bay, Fla., and Williamsburg, Va.

For more information, visit:

• AARP Passport: Sea World & Busch Gardens
• Sea World & Busch Gardens Conservation Fund