How One Second Turned A Nightmare into a Soul-Fulfilling Business
- Aug 28, 2025
- 3 min read
By Roberta Kravette
I’ve been a lifelong entrepreneur and have established businesses on two continents. Each had meaning beyond the mission statement or quarterly goals, but none filled that back-of-mind desire to create lasting good. The business I run today, the final start-up in a lifetime defined by them, accomplishes that goal.
In 2019, I was between businesses and, for fun, was writing content with a strong conservation perspective for a website I’d started, Destination: Wildlife.
Over time, I connected with local and regional conservation-missioned nonprofits. We hear about huge organizations—Audubon and the WWF (World Wildlife Foundation)—but hundreds of small, local, and regional nonprofits making huge impacts on their communities and beyond are mostly under the radar. Passion, not significant financing, usually drives these smaller organizations. The Grassland Bird Trust in Fort Edward, New York, is a perfect example.
The GBT preserves grasslands in New York State’s Fort Edward area. These grasslands sequester climate-changing carbon, provide habitat for dozens of threatened and endangered bird species, and help replenish the groundwater necessary for human life. The GBT was accomplishing all of this with two paid employees (total compensation expense, less than $50,000 yr), a host of volunteers, and net revenue after expenses of $26,745.
Small non-profits tend to make miracles happen. Preserved acreage was adding up, and the area’s ecology was improving—until the pandemic. Overnight, all income and volunteers vanished.
By 2021, out of money and ideas, Laurie called me to brainstorm, what I really need is a vacation, she sighed, why don’t you send me to Costa Rica? The pandemic was raging. We laughed.
A few days later, she called back with a list of people crazy enough to go with her. Sometimes, crazy ideas are contagious. I found a Costa Rican provider who thought he could keep a small group “bubbled” – and in January 2022, with lockdowns still in force, Laurie and nine guests flew to Costa Rica.
I spent the group’s two-week vacation at home, sleepless with worry. Finally, they returned, healthy and enthusiastic. I was relieved and eager to close that book!
Then Laurie asked where I was sending them next.
We laughed – but Laurie was serious. The trip’s non-earmarked income had saved them. Yearly fundraising trips would become part of their financial projections.
With one small-group trip, we raised $9,000.00 and saved an organization vital to the health of their area’s ecology. Using only local accommodations, guides, and restaurants, we’d also brought economic relief to a local economy in Costa Rica. The guests had a fabulous vacation in nature, discovered local cultures, and their cost came with a tax-deductible donation receipt!
This wasn’t just a vacation – this trip impacted the world.
I realized what we’d done was replicable for small—to mid-sized conservation-missioned nonprofit organizations nationwide.
In that second, I found my mission and set my next chapter. Destination: Wildlife’s Unforgettable Journeys that Do Good was born!
However, I am not a kid – I need to work fast!
We (my husband has joined me) now provide annual fundraising trips for small to mid-sized conservation-missioned organizations nationwide.
Our fundraising tours help protect the environment at home and directly benefit (and help stabilize) the local economies at the destination, giving our guests an added benefit, too. There are no corporate resorts, no plastic, mass-produced environments, just authentic, heart-to-heart experiences across cultures.
Destination: Wildlife is helping to make a healthier and more stable planet for ourselves and future generations. It’s what gets me up in the morning. And the idea was born in a single second of realization.
Connect With Roberta
What a powerful story — it’s inspiring how a moment of crisis was transformed into purpose. As someone deeply interested in the Coneten can investor business planner company Dubai, I see striking parallels: aligning values, vision, and action, turning adversity into meaningful success is the mark of real leadership.