Jericho, West Bank | Steve Szewczyk
Washington, D.C. | Bill Newcott
CBS Early Show
Kiembeni, Kenya | Karen Budd
Washington D.C. | Eli Meir Kaplan
Xi’an, China | Global Volunteers
Chile, southern fjords | Jeff Topham
Writer.
Seeker.
Storyteller.
I’m on a mission: To travel the world, meet amazing people, and learn how we can live our best lives.
“No one wants their life defined by the things they didn’t do.”
I wrote those words in my memoir, The Voluntourist, which shares my search for meaning as a volunteer in six countries, from China to Kenya to the West Bank. The themes from that book — giving, discovery, purpose, love — are threads throughout my travels and work, whether I’m blogging at a hospital in India or sipping tea with villagers in Mali. You‘ll find it all on this website: Stories from The Washington Post Magazine, National Geographic Traveler, The Atlantic, and more; TV and podcast appearances; and my newsletter on seeing the world and maximizing our 650,000 hours of life.
Featured Articles
The Voluntourist
“In this sincere and subtly written memoir, Budd gracefully — and often humorously — records how he changes ’emotionally, physically, spiritually’ as he travels to work with ‘people with real problems and different perspectives.’” —Publishers Weekly
“COVID-19 has provided an agonizing reminder:
Life is precious. Life is short.”
—from my essay for The Atlantic on resilience