I landed in Chiang Mai carrying two things: a backpack and a question I’d been circling for months—how do we “give back” in ways that are useful for local organizations and sustainable for the people who want to help? I’ve always loved the idea of showing up, rolling up sleeves, and leaving a place a little stronger. But on this trip, I wanted to test whether good intentions could meet real constraints: time, money, energy, and the reality that most of us have client work to deliver on Monday morning.
Chiang Mai is disarming in its gentleness. The mornings started with cool air slipping through café doors and ended with conversations that kept stretching just a little longer than planned. I met freelancers, founders, and remote workers who were candid about what they could offer and what they couldn’t. Many had tried volunteering in the past and burned out, or they worried about crowding out local jobs. Others simply didn’t know where to start. Listening to them, I felt a shift I’d been resisting: perhaps the default shouldn’t be “go help on the ground for free.” Perhaps the default should be smaller, steadier, and designed for handover.
That shift changed the way I talk about Nomad Impact. I stopped pitching “free work on site” and started testing a rhythm that people could actually keep: remote or hybrid missions, a solidarity rate (instead of 100% pro bono), and a 1% pledge of time or revenue. It sounds modest, because it is. And yet modest is exactly what makes it repeatable. The hope is that, over time, small repeatables beat big one-offs.
The second half of the trip took me to Phnom Penh to work with CFSWF, a workers’ union of roughly 2,500 members. If Chiang Mai was about the “why,” Phnom Penh was the “how.” I didn’t arrive with a grand plan; I arrived with questions and a notebook. What hurts the most today? What would meaningfully improve your week? Where do things fall through the cracks?
The answers were practical. They needed a website they could update easily in Khmer and English. They needed a way to see who’d paid their dues and who to follow up with. They needed consistent visuals and simple templates so that different people could produce communications without reinventing the wheel. None of this is glamorous. All of it is the plumbing that makes mission work visible and viable.
So we kept it small and concrete. We rebuilt the site to cover the essentials and wrote down a fast publishing protocol—what to update, how often, and where. We set up a lightweight membership CRM so the team could see, at a glance, who was up to date and trigger reminders without spending hours in spreadsheets. We created a condensed style guide and a library of Canva templates, then trained a three-person comms team to use them. Finally, we packaged everything into a handover folder with the most boring yet liberating ingredients: logins, checklists, and short how-to notes.
None of this would impress a room full of start-up founders. But the impact showed up quickly in small, practical ways: posts scheduled for the coming weeks, posters ready for print, a donation QR connected to a message they were proud to share, and—maybe most important—a dashboard that made the health of the membership tangible. With 2,500 members, being able to act on 1% of dues is not a theory; it’s the difference between guessing and planning.
If I’m honest, the most meaningful moment wasn’t a launch or a demo. It was when one of the comms team members updated a page without asking me how. They just did it, then taught someone else. That’s the exact feeling I want Nomad Impact to scale: the quiet handover of tools and confidence.
I also came away more grounded about the boundaries of our role. In conversations about difficult working conditions and slow paths to justice, it was clear that our contribution is not to investigate or to “save.” It’s to help local teams communicate, organize, and raise resources on their own terms. That means saying no to work that substitutes for local jobs. It means documenting everything so that people aren’t dependent on the person who built it. And it means measuring a few simple things so we can tell if the work is actually helping.
Back on the plane, I tried to put words around what had changed for me. Nomad Impact has always been about useful contributions, but I think I was still seduced by the idea of showing up in person and making something happen. Now, I’m more interested in what happens after I leave. Can the team run this without me? Did we pick the one deliverable that unlocks the next three steps for them? Did we leave behind a path that someone else can follow?
Practically, that means Nomad Impact moves forward as a mission orchestrator rather than a “doer of everything.” We keep the missions short—about 30 days—and we define them by a single useful deliverable plus a handover. We default to remote or hybrid to widen the pool of contributors and keep costs sane. We use a solidarity rate (not free, not full-agency prices) and invite people to pledge 1% so that the work can coexist with their lives. And we standardize the boring parts—intake questions, file structures, checklists—so that energy goes into the deliverable, not the admin.
It also means choosing what to measure and keeping it light. For CFSWF, that looked like three numbers we’ll track before and after: the percentage of members up to date on dues, the number of communications pieces actually published, and the donations coming in via QR or forms. These aren’t moon-shots; they’re dials on a dashboard. But turning those dials is how organizations grow their own capacity.
There’s a personal piece to this too. Travel has a way of stripping away the heroic story you tell yourself. In Chiang Mai, I caught myself reaching for big words; in Phnom Penh, I learned to prefer small tools that work. I’m happiest when the work makes me unnecessary. If the site can be updated by anyone on the team, if the CRM nudges the right follow-ups without me, if the style guide means posts don’t bottleneck on a single designer—then we did our job.
I don’t want to romanticize any of it. There were messy moments: a login that didn’t work, a translation that read oddly, a plan that was too ambitious for the time we had. But each time, the constraint was a teacher. It forced us to decide what mattered most, and then to make that one thing simple to use. That, more than anything, felt respectful of the people already doing the work.
So here’s where I am now: Nomad Impact, version two. Short, scoped missions. Remote or hybrid by default. A solidarity rate and a 1% pledge so contributors don’t burn out. One clear deliverable per mission, delivered with documentation and a real handover. And three small measures so we can learn out loud.
If you’re a freelancer or remote worker who has wanted to contribute but couldn’t see how to fit it into your life, I’d love to talk. If you’re part of an NGO or association with one specific pain point—a site that needs to be usable, a basic CRM to track members, a comms kit your team can actually maintain—tell me what would make next month easier. And if you run events or communities exploring “giving back,” I’m keen to turn inspiration into action plans people can carry home.
Three weeks wasn’t enough to do everything. It was enough to start differently. I left Thailand with ideas, and Cambodia with proof that small, documented deliverables—handed over well—are the most respectful way I know to help. That’s the path I’m taking from here.