Feature Interview--Evita Robinson's Nomadness Travel Movement
Have you heard of Nomadness? Well if you haven't, you most definitely will soon. My boy brought Evita Robinson over to my place for a heated game night one evening over a year ago. He insisted adamantly that I talk to this woman, and upon officially meeting her over an impassioned game of Taboo, I totally got it. Evie Robbie, as her friends call her, is a goddess of world travel. In 2010 she created a travel web series, and by 2013 (at press time), she clocks in over 4000 members in her closed international travel group Nomadness Travel Tribe--a Facebook based online community for travel enthusiasts like us--and by "us" I mean the culture-curious, young adventurers who prefer off-the-beaten-path travel over big resorts. The biggest perk of being invited as a member to the Tribe is that you get dibs on the amazing trip packages that Evie organizes for the travel group to amazing destinations around the world. There is a very special bond that Tribe members get to experience when they are journeying together to foreign destinations. If you are about that life, check them out. This is a woman who walks the way she talks. By the time of this interview, she had been featured in Ebony and Clutch Magazine for Nomadness. It's near impossible NOT to believe her because her work is a reflection of her greatest passion, her truest higher self, and satisfies a huge void in the international travel community. All of that in mind, I couldn't bear to dwindle down this awesome interview because of the great take-aways that NEED to be shared. Here I've broken it into two pieces--1) the Feature Interview below and 2) a Creative Resource piece, for budding entrepreneurs who can gain from Evie's dope advice. I promise, you won't want to miss it.
How did you come up with the idea for NomadnessTV, the web series?
I was out in Japan for a year. I had a year teaching contract out there, and ten months into teaching and seeing that no one from home was going to come out and visit me, I was like, "I get it.” It's a hella long flight and extremely expensive place to come visit. I then thought, I need to bring Japan to them, and decided the easiest way to do that was social media. It was cool to be able to share my experiences with friends and family, and let my mom know that I was alive. After a while of cutting little vignettes of my travel experiences, I started to touch into my actual network of people that I knew who worked in TV and media to pick their brains.
I realized when I was out there in Japan, before moving to Thailand for a little bit, there was no travel group or organization that I felt like I wanted to be part of. I thought they were dry and boring, and didn't feel like there were a lot of groups that I could relate to. There was nothing for any type of crowd that I came from, or anybody who looked like me. That was the same paradox that I was finding when I was traveling. As I was backpacking by myself, there weren't that many people of color out there. There were a lot of women traveling by themselves, which was interesting to me, because there are so many stigmas and preconceived fears of what it's like to be a woman out there traveling alone, especially backpacking. I was learning a lot of new dynamic. Travel was something that I was interested in, but I didn't know that my entire career/life/business was going to soon be worked around it.
How did The Travel Tribe form?
I stay coming up with these crazy ideas. One day I was like, I can't find the community that I want to identify with, so I'm going to create it. I graduated in 2006, and when everybody else was looking for a job, I left. I moved to Paris, and I stayed half a summer with one of my best friends from high school. I did a filmmaking workshop with the New York Film Academy. It was really on that trip that I realized that the travel bug was in me. It bit me and lodged itself under my skin. I made a promise to myself to bridge travel with my love for TV, mass media, and my love for talking. I've always had a big mouth and an opinion to follow it. I wanted to bring those things together naturally.
The first NomadnessTV web episode aired online on February 26th 2010. I did not launch the Nomadness Travel Tribe until September 28, 2011. There was a nice buffer of time between the two, for me to think of the idea of creating a community. In the beginning, Nomadness was very me, me, me! It was very Evita oriented, which also stems from the fact of me always wanting my own travel show. Soon after, creating a community for other people became very important because it wasn't just about me, but it was about exploring the a bigger dialogue with people.
You earlier stated that other travel communities represented in the media don’t represent people like you. How would you go about defining who you are?
I was born in Albany. I Left there shortly after my parents split. I grew up in Poughkeepskie, New York, and I went to Iona college in New Rochelle. Right after graduating I dipped to Paris. I've been a Bronx resident for the last five or six years very intermittently between international travel, where I've been gone from a number of months to a year or more in a chunk of time. I've always come back to The Bronx. There's just an urban appeal that I always love. I'm apart of the hip-hop generation. I wanted to create something for people like me. I couldn't find anything that I felt was really gauging or effectively hitting that community and representing it well.
I'm educated. A lot of the people that I roll with are educated people. It's not hip-hop in the sense of your pants sagging, and you have no form of higher education. I want to represent hip-hop in a positive light. I didn't want to create "the black travel group." I tell people that all the time, and I stick by that. If anything, it's about people with an urban appeal, because I lived in Japan for a year, and I can show you urban that is very much not black. For the sake of media and a lot of entities, it all kind of gets clumped together, and I want to show that there is room for it all. There is differentiation, and there is a bigger umbrella, and I never want to pigeonhole myself. I think the demographic that we attract is natural, but I'm not trying to keep anyone out on a diversity realm. I feel like there is stuff that a lot of people from different walks of life can take from it.
What is the number one factor that makes you interested in exploring different cultures?
It started right after I graduated from college. I am the only person in my family that does what I do. Most of my life I existed in a single parent household—just me, my mother, and my brother. We're not that close with my mother's side of the family, but we forged relationships with them as we got older. My grandmother is white and Western European on that side--I think mostly Irish, Italian, and Dutch. My mother's maiden name is German. My father's side of the family is African American, but there's a lot of Native American on both sides, and I just found out within the last 12 months that my grandma's last name is French, and we also have Indian in us too. I think that breeds a little--at least subconsciously--into why I'm so curious. It's a child-like quality that's never left. That fuels a lot of me wanting to see new places.
How were you bit by the travel bug?
I went to a very affluent, very Caucasian school. I used to go to house parties and my very affluent friends would talk about how they spent the summer in Spain or Italy studying abroad, and things like that. I remember one day, I had had it. I made this silent promise to myself, and I said, "One day I'm going to be able to participate in these conversations. I don't know when. I don't know why, but I feel like I'm missing out on something." It's always funny now, because when I see those same people, they don't even want to talk about travel around me anymore. My stories blow them out of the water [laughter]. It's the little things that become your motivations.
How did your membership spread so fast and far?
I remember having conversations with one of my best friends who's in the Tribe, Stephanie O'Connor, I said, "I started this website, I want to create a social network. It's going to be like Facebook, but it's for travelers. She reminded me that, "It's just you." Again, I think grandiose. She told me, “Maybe you just want to start it as a Facebook group.” I hated Facebook groups. I only really pay attention to about four or five that I'm in. My whole thing was, I don't want just anybody in it. There's got to be some sense of exclusivity to it. That's where the whole idea of our members needing to get at least one passport stamp to even get in the group came about. We want the members to already understand the importance in it once they're invited, so they'll value it.
The Tribe started with a friend telling me that I was getting a little bit ahead of myself and to scale back a little. It ended up being a great resource, especially because my network through the web series was already fostered on Facebook.
How many countries are you represented in now?
At this point, we're approaching three dozen countries with people who are either from there, or are ex-pats and live there now. We have a huge saturation in the United States, which is probably our majority, but we have a number of people in UK, France, South Korea, Japan, and Brazil is one of our biggest hubs.
When I first met you, you invited me to a Tribe Meetup, and it was huge! Is that happening all over the world?
All over the world on a weekly basis. About four or five months ago, I was talking to the High Counsel, and we projected that it was going to get to a point where there's going to be something going on with the Tribe every single week. It's been like that for almost the last two months now. Literally there is something going on somewhere in the world at least once a week. I give them the freedom to create Meetups that are not micromanaged. There is usually a person in the region who wants to be the organizer. I think giving them that freedom, they cherish it and they really respect the movement, so they represent well.
What is it that you hope for Nomadness in 5 years?
I want Nomadness--this is going to happen this year actually--we have to get off of Facebook. The investor money and what I’m going for right now is twofold for 2013: to get us off of Facebook and into our own online entity that we are building right now, and for myself and high counsel and anyone else that comes on staff to be able to get paid for it so we’re living off of it, and it’s turning a profit. Another goal is to have the Nomadness merchandise in stores. I would love an H&M or Uniqlo placement. That’s a big thing for me, as well as television. Like I said, the Tribe is for everyone. The TV thing is a very personal goal for me, and something that I have been fighting for longer than any other aspect of Nomadness, and we’ve made some amazing headway in these first eight weeks of this year. I think we are going to have all of it by next year. I feel that 2013 is the year that Nomadness is going to blow up. I don’t want anybody ever to be able to think of travel and not think of Nomadness. Literally, we are going to flip this travel industry on its head. That’s what I’ve always wanted. It’s young and innovative. When I say young--I don’t even mean solely age. I mean energy. There’s just a youthfulness to these people regardless of age. It's the appeal of this location independent lifestyle, and people really taking back their lives.
I signed up for a lot of things with Nomadness, but what I didn’t sign up for was how many people in the course of a year put posts up talking about how inspired they are with the story that they’ve quit their 9-5 jobs and moved abroad. I’m like, I didn’t sign up for that. It’s one of those really cool side effects and I think it’s only going to get bigger, and it’s only going to get more inspiring and more powerful. I think going into 2013, we’re going to have more control, and we’re going to be in more places. That’s the goal well before 2015.
Wow. I totally believe you.
Interview by Boyuan Gao
Photos courtesy of Evita Robinson
Check out Part II, The Unyielding Pursuit of a Travel Entrepreneur--Lessons From Evie Robie in Creative Resources.
