Cornerstone Membership: What it really means

How we really serve members in the travel and experiential education industry

If you’re a Cornerstone member (or considering membership), there are some elements of membership that seem self-explanatory. You receive risk management, medical, and mental health support from experts. You can access a wealth of resources - templates, education, protocols - at your fingertips in the Resource Library. You have consultation, guidance, and an actual hand to hold when things don’t go according to plan.

With the passing of our second anniversary, we wanted to dive in a little deeper.

At Cornerstone, we are more than consultants. We are an extension of your team. We consider ourselves part of your organization and treat your needs, goals, and challenges as our own. Together, we come up with solutions that far exceed the scope of what a typical consultant offers.

Over the last two years at Cornerstone Safety Group, we’ve had the pleasure of working with 30+ member organizations as we provide the most comprehensive support possible to the travel and experiential education industry. We’ve also noted that members use their membership hours in thoughtful and creative ways that go beyond the obvious support resources.

So, settle in for some stories of success, strategy, and solutions. Today, we are offering concrete examples of how members utilize our services to reach improved outcomes in all functions of their organizations.

Screening Support

When you’re screening travelers for medical, mental health, or travel preparedness, you know what’s at stake. Hopefully, you have essential eligibility criteria and a screening process ready for your teams. After all, the wrong participants on the wrong travel program can cost your teams significant time and money, as well as impact the group experience – your number one priority!

However, there are often challenges that arise outside of the guidelines of your policies and criteria. For many members, Cornerstone’s mental health team has stepped in early to help identify a given participant’s wellness, based on information provided.

Dr. Beth Warsof, one of Cornerstone’s Mental Health Advisors, offers an example of how working with organizations pre-departure supports their in-field outcomes. “We support students, staff, and community with mental health and wellness through pre-trip screening, finding out what the health disclosures really meant, and identifying what we needed to know more about. As part of this screening process, we supported staff in thinking about how they would actually deliver the right type of support to travelers and whether they needed to scaffold any educational or adventure components.”

On the medical side, Dr. Josh Dubansky, Cornerstone’s Medical Director, lent a hand in navigating whether certain diagnoses would prevent a participant from engaging with select components of a trip or whether the organization was equipped to manage specific dietary needs. “In one instance,” says Dr. Dubansky, “I also helped explain the reasoning behind declined travel permission for a student who wanted to bring their own self-administered vaccination series. When [determining] what’s right for both the traveler and the organization, it can be helpful for our voice to support the admissions/traveler enrollment staff with a trusted medical opinion.”

This can really come in handy when your admissions or enrollment staff (who are screening) may not have a background in medicine or mental health. Cornerstone experts support these staff with expertise in identifying “red flags” and guiding the organization on next steps. We even deliver specific training to help your organization manage complex cases.

When our members need additional help, we’re there. Many members request that Cornerstone’s mental health team sit down with program/trip leaders to review medications and diagnoses of their assigned travelers before each trip. This provides a space to talk further about how a specific drug side effect could manifest or provide specific tips on how to manage a participant dealing with ADHD, OCD, or any number of other conditions we are frequently navigating on travel programs. These meetings are valuable in both their preventative nature and also instill confidence in field leadership - something that can transform their resilience and add to your company culture.

Custom Training & Coaching for Management & Staff

While organizations commonly think of medicine, mental health, and risk management as departments separate from operations, marketing, sales, and program delivery, it’s really all tied together. Navigating the Cornerstone functions of expertise is a necessity for all experiential education and travel organizations, as these topics are interwoven in every other aspect of your business.

From planning travel for participants to meeting them at the airport to setting up transportation for the day’s adventures - each component includes potential for risk and requires forethought to best support your participants and staff. In particular, your staff, from company leadership to in-field leaders/guides, can feel the weight and stress of making sure everything goes according to plan.

But sometimes things do not go according to plan.

When incidents do, inevitably, occur, it’s helpful for all levels of staff to have undergone Cornerstone custom training in advance. Our training across every level of the organization gives guidelines and shared vocabulary to navigate unforeseen circumstances as a team. Training and continuous engagement help ensure that training isn’t just an hour in a classroom and policies aren’t just a document collecting dust. Rather, we focus on equipping all staff with the tools to use the protocols in real time, implement practical tools, and to react appropriately, given their own emotions and perspective.

Cornerstone’s expertise can also come in handy when a staff member is in need of one-to-one coaching or a team debrief.

“For a Cornerstone member this summer, I provided one-on-one coaching with a field staff member,” says Dr. Warsof. “This staff member expressed to their leadership team that they needed more thorough debriefing with a mental health professional, given a challenging situation they navigated with a traveler. I was able to help them unpack what happened, what they could have done better, and how to improve their skills. We were able to start to explore, together, whether it was the right thing for them to stay on the travel program and what their mental health needs were.”

Education & Professional Development

Beyond custom training delivered for members, Cornerstone serves our mission to support CEOs and business leaders by offering webinar and professional development events each month. In these events, members get the opportunity to expand on the templates, tools, and guides offered in the Resource Library.

Hosted by internal leaders or guest experts, these sessions cover vendor vetting, crisis response planning, medical basics, emotional wellbeing, crisis communications, and more. Making these events and recordings easily accessible to members and their staff is one of the ways Cornerstone ensures that we’re all sharing access to important knowledge that could ultimately save lives.

Cornerstone customizes our training to specific member needs.

“HQ staff have reached out to ask for help with more complex nuances as they see them in the field,” says Dr. Warsof. “We use our expertise and our research to help inform new educational resources. As an example, one traveler (a minor) on a program disclosed significant mental health concerns to a program leader. After managing the incident, we also provided language to the HQ staff on how to speak with the family - about limitations of the program, location, and the realities of a travel program. Helping HQ staff with this language gave them all shared vocabulary and new practical tools to evaluate how they manage these conversations in the future.”

Development of Procedures, Policies, and Response Plans

Before things happen in the field, it’s your responsibility to ensure your field staff (and HQ staff) are equipped with the knowledge, policies, and response procedures to manage any potential situation. This alignment amongst organizational teams is imperative to protect human lives and business stability.

“One of our members, a significant player within the experiential education space, recently merged multiple brands under a single corporate entity,” says Dave Dennis, Executive Director of Cornerstone. “Each brand arrived with its own unique culture, systems, and management structures. While respecting the uniqueness of each brand, the corporate company wanted to align their crisis response system across all brands to simplify response procedures and create a way for the collective group to support one another should a large-scale crisis occur. Cornerstone Safety Group was called in to help.” We developed a robust plan inclusive of crisis response roles and responsibilities, trained teams individually, and ran scenarios and exercises to validate response plan feasibility. We now repeat this process at least annually with this member.

As travelers and needs change within an organization, Cornerstone has also been there for members to ensure that the procedures change alongside them. Staying relevant and having meaningful, consistent actions that follow these plans is crucial to success.

“Updating and reviewing crisis management plans, policy manuals, and staff handbooks aren’t often what people within member organizations want to focus their time on,” says Mike Armstrong, Cornerstone’s Risk Management Advisor. “But that’s where we come in! It’s necessary and provides true value, especially when having an outside risk management expert’s review, to make sure that you’re ready to deliver transformative travel programs.”

Keeping these tools up-to-date is important and complex. Whether updating essential roles and responsibilities of a crisis plan when teams shift or updating a protocol to include allowing diabetic travelers on a new program, Cornerstone is there.

In the Field

When things don’t go according to plan, it helps to have a team of experts who can guide you through an unexpected or unprecedented event. Cornerstone experts serve as an extension of your team during times of crisis and when incidents occur.

“Things happen! When a member requests on-call support from our team, we’re there,” says Dr. Warsof. “For example, a traveler was experiencing some isolated mental health concerns. When the traveler was brought to a clinic for a different health issue, the provider, ill-equipped to handle mental health concerns, wanted to unnecessarily escalate the concern. We suggested a different course of action that ultimately served the traveler more effectively and saved the program significant time and energy investment down an unhelpful route. We were glad to help the HQ team,, and we were able to make sure that the student received the appropriate care and completed the program successfully.”

This kind of teamwork also comes in handy when participants arrive in the field with undisclosed medical or mental health challenges. Our team has assisted members in managing travelers who later disclosed mental health needs, fainting episodes, chronic headaches, head injuries, inappropriate antibiotic or drug use, and allergies. In the most extreme and tragic example, Cornerstone’s Executive Director has even played an active role in responding to and supporting a death in the field with one of our members. When we say we’re an extension of our members, we mean it.

At Cornerstone Safety Group, we are passionate about comprehensive risk management, medical, and mental health services for the travel and experiential education industries. For more than two years, it’s been a pleasure to work with and serve our members! As we look toward the future of the organization - and the industry itself - we can’t wait to see how we continue to grow, together.