Ask Evita Robinson why she travels and she’ll tell you: freedom. The three-time expat and veteran solo backpacker has been racking up passport stamps ever since a life-changing trip to Paris following university. In 2011, she founded the Nomadness Travel Tribe, an online community for adventurous travelers of color. What started out as a small, scrappy group has evolved into a network of more than 22,000 members whose journeys bring in an estimated $50 million for the travel industry annually. Numbers like that are enough to get people’s attention and in recent years, tourism boards and tour companies have been reaching out to Robinson to find out how to connect with travelers of color in more meaningful ways.
Yet despite significant progress, Robinson still sees a lot of work to be done in order for the industry to truly diversify, and she has continued to spread her message through other initiatives, including the web series The Nomadness Project, which she co-created with Issa Rae of HBO’s Insecure. Using footage from Nomadness trips, the show documents real travelers getting up close with lions in South Africa and watching Muay Thai fights in Thailand. And last year in Oakland, California, Robinson launched Audacity Fest, a travel festival catering to millennial travelers of color featuring discussions and speeches from the likes of Kellee Edwards, the first black woman to have her own show on the Travel Channel, and Janaye Ingram, an organizer of the Women’s March.
The third annual Audacity Fest will take place in New York City from August 20 to 23, and early bird tickets go on sale on November 29.
We caught up with Robinson for a conversation about running with the bulls, breaking down stereotypes, and building a global movement.
What was the idea behind the Nomadness Travel Tribe?
For me, it was about galvanizing community. It was about breaking not only racial, but also socioeconomic bounds—letting people know that they didn’t need to be rich, white, and affluent to see the world. It was about creating space amongst ourselves for us to celebrate one another and travel. It was about doing the things other folks say we don’t: running with the bulls in Pamplona and being the only black people at Holi festival in India, but still representing. We want to go on these kinds of trips, too, but not everyone sees that because there’s still a gross lack of representation in the travel industry and mass media.
How did this whole thing get started?
When I was teaching English in Japan, I started video blogging. It was just me with my pirated Final Cut Pro from college, a shitty camera, and shoddy audio, but the content resonated with people. At that time, you weren’t seeing a lot of black twenty-something women saying, “Hey, I’m just going to uproot my life, move to Japan, and backpack around India. Oh, and by the way I’m broke while I’m doing all of this.”
What drove you to reach out to people?
When I first created a community of a hundred people, I didn’t realize that I was answering a call for myself. I don’t come from a family of travelers. I’m definitely the black sheep and the outlier in my family. Half the time they’re like, “This is dope, but this is crazy.” In that regard, I personally needed community and didn’t see it at that point in time.
Why was that?
When we started almost eight years ago, a lot of Twitter feeds were about things like “Top 10 Places to Eat Pizza in Italy.” Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out how to identify with my family when nobody else was a traveler and why my long-distance relationship was shit when I got home, but it was fine while I was abroad. I needed to have more intimate, real-life types of conversations.
What kinds of travelers make up the Tribe?
Nomadness is not the organization you should sign up for if you want to stay at your resort the whole time. There are a million other groups out there for that, and we don’t knock it at all. We are the community that you want to sign up for if you want to get into the guts of a place, if you want to hang out on the corner in Stone Town in Zanzibar, share a beer with a local, and breathe in the night air.
Other than a sense of adventure, are there any prerequisites for joining?
We want to make sure that when people get into the Tribe, they know that they are amongst their peers and that there is a certain ilk of traveler. To this day, the one prerequisite is you have to have at least one passport stamp. We want to know that you’ve taken the dive on your own, because we’re not here to coerce you to do it.
I’m guessing running with bulls or wandering around Zanzibar forges some serious bonds between members.
We’ve had people get into relationships or get pregnant after meeting through Nomadness. People have started businesses with one another. You get all of the contacts that you get within any community, but it just so happens that our connective tissue is travel. That’s what makes us so strong.
I want to talk a little bit about Audacity Fest. What was your goal in creating it?
It’s the first festival in the country to target millennial travelers of color. We’re having those unedited, unabashed, open conversations about what it’s like to be a person of color in this industry, what it feels like to be ignored. Communities like Nomadness were created because I don’t wait for y’all. We answer our own call. We create our own businesses. We’ve created our own niche within this larger industry to pop off and flourish.
What does that look like in terms of the festival itself?
For our keynote panel last year, we had an African-American, a Syrian-American, and a Muslim-American all talking honestly about what it’s like traveling as a person of color in their respective demographics under Trump. We had a panel for people of color who also happen to intersect with the LGBTQ community. Where do they feel safe? What do they look for in a destination that they would put their dollars towards? Then we also had the industry stuff about location independent entrepreneurship for people who are now influencers in black travel.
Have you seen substantial changes in attitudes since you started Nomadness?
There is definitely progress. Have we hit some sort of nirvana? Hell, no. All you have to do is go to some of the top travel-oriented conferences and just look around. Until you see more inclusive representation, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done.
What do you predict for the future of the travel industry?
You’re dealing with another industry that needs to be disrupted, because it’s only going to get more diverse and continue to grow in size. If the majority of millennials started traveling in our early twenties, now we’re having children who are going to start traveling out of the womb. This isn’t a fad. It’s the beginning of a generational shift.
This article was originally published in March 2019 and has been updated with new information.