Meet the Cornerstone Advisors: Harry Alvarez
At Cornerstone Safety Group, we’re honored to have industry leaders as our advisors and thought partners. Our advisors across a wide array of disciplines provide perspective, guidance, and industry insights to our staff and members.
Throughout this blog series, we’ll be introducing some of our advisors and learning more about how the travel industry captured their attention.
This December, we’re joined by Harry Alvarez!
Tell us about how you began in the industry and your connection to your specialty regions?
Travel has been a part of my life since at six months old my entire family boarded a flight back to the Dominican Republic. 1980’s New York City was not where my parents envisioned raising their children and they retreated to their home land. Ever since I've had the privilege of calling both these identities mine. I’m both Dominican and American. And yes I'm also Dominican-American. Living in the space between cultures has allowed me to learn from both, and apply it in my everyday life. My brothers and I (and an entire generation) navigated these spaces. Moving back and forth between knocking down mangoes with rocks in our backyard in Santo Domingo and playing handball at the courts of our Bronx neighborhood.
Having to navigate through different languages, cultures, and daily realities promotes grit, empathy, and a sense of community. These are the lessons that students (young and old) learn when they participate in a homestay, contribute to a community impact project, or take a long drive through new landscapes. It was not until my adult life that I began to call any of those trips to the Dominican Republic travel. It took me going to Costa Rica, and experiencing a new culture for me to realize that the benefits of travel are ingrained in who I am. I made a career of travel and made a commitment to myself to continue to explore. To push my boundaries. Because it is at the edge of our comfort zone that we learn the most. I’ve learned about the value of community and the benefits of cross cultural collaboration. That diversity makes us stronger because it diversifies the points of view from which we can draw. And that the world is an ever connected place where decisions made on one continent can have a drastic effect on communities across the world. It is only through learning about one another's cultures, customs, and realities that we can create space for us to collaborate, and when we collaborate as a global community the sky’s the limit.
Why did you decide to be an advisor to Cornerstone and how do you hope to serve our members?
In order to foment change at a greater scale we need to join forces with collaborators who share our values. For me Cornerstone embodies that perfectly. So often we get a little greedy with our knowledge, experience, and expertise. We hold it tight, and don't share because we feel it's "our" special sauce. But when we collaborate, share ideas, and push for change our impact is much larger and has the potential to influence the industry in ways that benefit us all. This is especially the case when it comes to Safety and Risk Management. If we all push for vendor vetting, for vendors that carry insurance, or for stricter safety protocols then those vendors will be accustomed to that, and that will become the standard. Through collective action we have the power to influence the industry in grand ways, and bring all of us up in quality.
For me this also applies to the topics of diversity, equity, and inclusion. But not simply at the U.S level, but zooming into diversity at the regional and local level.
“A Latino kid from the Bronx? He’s not our typical candidate”. That’s how my career in travel started. Thankfully the other person in that conversation had the courage to say “isn’t that a good thing?”.
More often the conversation goes differently, and we end up hiring those we’re comfortable with. Those in our network. The people we went to college with. The person your old college buddy went to grad school with, or the son of the football coach. The people that just happen to look, talk, and act just like us. It’s normal. We all have a certain level of narcissism that makes us think that we are greatness. So, more of us is good. This is an incredibly hard habit to break. And one that ten years into my career I've experienced first hand.
Most travel conferences, study abroad fairs, gap year fairs, risk management conferences etc are dominated by a monolith of voices all coming from one culture. Yet these same venues are trying to engage with communities all over the world and represent those cultures. In order to do this appropriately we need more voices in the room that are from these places, represent its culture, and look like the folks there.
Who better to guide a group of tourists in the Dominican Republic than a Dominican-American. Who better to explain the horrors of the Khmer Rouge than the grandson of someone who was a victim to the genocide, and who better to teach us the rhythms of Ghana than a native daughter. We value these experiences so much, but are we doing the work necessary to assure that those folks that are key components of our programming have a voice in its design, implementation, and management, let alone the economic benefits of its profits?
What is one thing you're hopeful about as we enter 2022?
I'm feeling so hopeful it is hard to pick one. I'm hopeful that in picking my backpack back up and traveling to communities we have not had the chance to work with in almost two years we are still received with open arms. I'm hopeful because I see the hope in Doña Esperanza's eyes because her community which runs Sonido Del Yaque ( a community operated eco-lodge in the Dominican Republic) was able to pivot to local tourism and is still standing through the pandemic. I also see hope that Dominicans who often choose to travel abroad instead of seeing the beauty in their backyard were able to experience that. I see hope in that just about every community member I spoke with over the past weeks had been vaccinated, and saw the value and importance of vaccinations. I see hope in that after going through this collective grief leaders at all levels of our industry are trying to rebuild more efficiently, more sustainably, and stronger.