Each year, staff from the Bellevue office of Paul Gauguin Cruises volunteer and donate to charities and support organizations. We hope to make a difference in our community by giving back and helping those in need.

This month our staff participated for the sixth consecutive year in the Children’s Home Society of Washington’s Holiday Helper program which assists families in need. The Paul Gauguin Cruises team sponsored a family and purchased clothes, shoes, rain boots, art supplies, and toys, and also provided a gift card to be used toward a holiday meal.

For the fifth consecutive year, Paul Gauguin Cruises’ staff volunteered at Northwest Harvest—Washington’s statewide hunger relief agency. Led by our President Diane Moore, we packaged 2,700 pounds of oats, which provided 2,077 meals for needy families.

Paul Gauguin Cruises also proudly supported Tourism Cares, the charitable arm of the travel and tourism industry. Tourism Cares is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that preserves and enriches the travel experience for future generations. The organization channels the philanthropic passion and commitment of the travel industry to protect and restore valuable destinations we all care about—and support those destinations as engines for prosperity and pride in their communities.

In September, three members of our marketing team took part in Tourism Cares’ volunteer event at Mt. Rainier National Park in Washington. This was the fourth event in the National Park Service Centennial volunteer series. Together 100 travel and tourism volunteers from cruise lines, tour operators, attractions, hotels, tourism bureaus, travel organizations, travel agents, and travel industry suppliers around the nation worked alongside National Park Service staff in helping to preserve the special landscape of this important national treasure. 

The Tourism Cares volunteers, together with National Park Service staff, undertook various projects on Mt. Rainier. Projects included historic landscape maintenance, vista clearing in Longmire, winter-prep of the Stewardship Campground, trail maintenance at Paradise by the park’s main visitor center, and the planting of willows along the park’s Westside Road.

Earlier in the year, Paul Gauguin Cruises sponsored the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) Run for the Wild—a 5K Run and Family Fun Run/Walk held at the Bronx Zoo in support of WCS' work to help save wildlife and wild places. 

We thank our employees who have volunteered and generously donated this year and also our travel partners who help those in need in our community. And we look forward to helping with initiatives to preserve and enrich travel experiences around the world again in 2017.