Last week on our blog we kicked off a new series of posts on different gap-year adventure options by looking at the working holiday and volunteering opportunities offered by BUNAC. Today’s post brings us to another of the big players in the gap year industry: i-to-i. Stick around for this one if you like the idea of helping to save the planet one tree and endangered animal at a time!

i-to-i have almost two decades of experience behind them in sending young people around the world, with over 5,000 students a year signing up for one of their schemes. And although i-to-i is a company rather than a charity, its business model is to work in partnership with local organisations based across the world for certain key parts of their schemes such as accommodation and local transport, meaning that a good chunk of the fee you pay finds its way into the local economy of the developing country in which you are staying. This is all part of i-to-i’s philosophy of helping local economies in the developing world without building up a dynamic of aid dependence for those local communities.

Of course, your contribution to the local community should you book a place on an i-to-i project goes far beyond your money being funnelled into the local economy. The company offers one of the most diverse portfolios of volunteering experiences available, both in terms of the volunteer work you can do and the places you can do it. At present i-to-i run volunteering projects in over twenty different countries, located in Asia, Africa, Oceania and Central and South America.

The company is particularly noted for the wildlife and environmental conservation projects it offers. If you’re idea of a life-changing gap-year experience is getting up close and personal with some of the world’s rarest and most amazing creatures, then its panda conservation and lion cubs packages could be perfect for you. Equally you could find yourself helping to preserve the Amazon Rainforest or the flora and fauna of the Galapagos Islands.

If working with people rather than creatures or plants is more your thing then i-to-i also have plenty of packages that could be of interest to you. If you think you might be interested in teaching as a career, their two- and four-week TEFL packages are a great way to try out your teaching skills and also help some of the poorest kids in the world. And people who are more hands-on can get really stuck into their building and construction projects. What bigger difference is it possible to make to the lives’ of some of the world’s most underprivileged communities than helping them to get a roof over their heads?

All told, i-to-i’s schemes provide a really accessible way to use part of your gap year to give something back to the global community and visit some seriously far-flung parts of the world. Do keep in mind, however, that i-to-i’s gap-year experiences typically tend to be less than a month in duration, so should probably be seen as just one component of a gap year–albeit a spectacular one–rather than a plan for the whole year.