The Cornerstone Blog
Providing insights, updates, and guidance to the experiential education & travel industry
Building a Crisis Response Team
As an experiential education or travel operator, you’re surely well-versed in incident response. Do you and your organization have a clear plan of action for how you respond to emergent, unstable events?
When a crisis occurs, your organization relies on your response plan, and the individuals responsible for each function, to act accordingly. Prepare today by following these guidelines for developing a Crisis Response Team.
Meet the Cornerstone Advisors: Mark Vermeal
At Cornerstone Safety Group, we’re honored to have industry leaders as our volunteer advisors and thought partners. Our advisors across a wide array of disciplines provide perspective, guidance, and industry insights to our staff and members. Throughout this blog series, we’ll be introducing some of our advisors and learning more about how the travel industry captured their attention. This March, we’re joined by Mark Vermeal!
Duty of Care: Human Safety for the Travel & Experiential Education Industry
Cornerstone is founded on the belief that protecting human lives is not intellectual property, but a shared responsibility. We believe that knowing where human safety fits within your organization and having actionable processes to navigate complex situations is paramount to operational success.
Meet the Cornerstone Advisors: Biama Charles
At Cornerstone Safety Group, we’re honored to have industry leaders as our advisors and thought partners. Our advisors across a wide array of disciplines provide perspective, guidance, and industry insights to our staff and members. Throughout this blog series, we’ll be introducing some of our advisors and learning more about how the travel industry captured their attention. This March, we’re joined by Biama Charles!
Reviewing your Homestay Guidelines for 2022 & Beyond
At Cornerstone, our members have the unique opportunity to bring relevant challenges to the table and work together with peer organizations to create solutions. As we adapt to the next evolution of the pandemic and what that means for our member organizations, one such topic was brought to the table early in 2022: reintroducing homestay experiences.
Event Norms: Cornerstone Safety Group
To make Cornerstone meetings and trainings beneficial for all participants, we ask that attendees abide by the following etiquette. When we follow these norms, the value of each session increases and attendees are more likely to make peer connections. In return, we at Cornerstone will abide by the best practices and expectations set forth below, as event organizers.
What We’ve Learned: The Importance of Participant Communication
I recently had a conversation with one of the Cornerstone community members discussing "gut feelings" about Omicron and how this might impact the progress and optimism for international programming in 2022. While there's no true answer to this question, it got me thinking about what we could and should be doing given our experiences over the past two years.
The Omicron Variant and CDC Guidelines Update from Cornerstone
We know that our community, industry leaders like you, are working hard to make the right decisions for your programming. With that in mind, we sat down this week with Cornerstone Co-Founder and Medical Director, Joshua Dubansky, MD, FACEP, to discuss the reality of the Omicron variant, the updated definition of “fully vaccinated,” and how to handle some of the most common situations our members and community face.
Meet the Cornerstone Advisors: Doug Stevens
At Cornerstone Safety Group, we’re honored to have industry leaders as our advisors and thought partners. Our advisors across a wide array of disciplines provide perspective, guidance, and industry insights to our staff and members. Throughout this blog series, we’ll be introducing some of our advisors and learning more about how the travel industry captured their attention. This January, we’re joined by Doug Stevens!
Emotional First Aid on Programs: What, Why, & How
Experiential education and travel-based programs offer an intensive, often life-changing learning experiences for both the participants and staff. During these programs, individuals are challenged personally as they reflect upon their core beliefs, encounter stressful travel and social situations, and confront some of our global society's greatest challenges.
Medical Updates: What you should know about the Omicron Variant
Regular updates in our evolving industry are critical to Cornerstone’s mission to provide essential health, safety and risk management services for the travel and experiential education industries. As such, we tapped into the expertise of our Medical Director, Joshua Dubansky, MD, FACEP, to provide our community additional information about the Omicron variant.
Meet the Cornerstone Advisors: Harry Alvarez
At Cornerstone Safety Group, we’re honored to have industry leaders as our advisors and thought partners. Our advisors across a wide array of disciplines provide perspective, guidance, and industry insights to our staff and members. Throughout this blog series, we’ll be introducing some of our advisors and learning more about how the travel industry captured their attention. This December, we’re joined by Harry Alvarez!