The NOMADNESS Travel festival is landing in Louisville, KY September 28th. In their second conference post-pandemic, the 4-day festival is creating space for BIPOC travelers to convene, connect and get deep into discussions centering this year’s theme of “Cultural and Conscious Travel.” (Interested in attending? Use the code “Louisville” for 50% off your registration.)

The festival was born of the award-winning NOMADNESS Travel Tribe. Evie Robinson founded the travel group for BIPOC world-seekers in 2011 and has watched her community balloon from 100 travelers to more than 34K.

Although Robinson is an avid traveler and known for her success as an entrepreneur, she considers herself a storyteller first and foremost. Whether she’s writing, producing videos or hosting a trip, her priorities and questions remain the same: how can she, and the BIPOC travelers she’s with, put our money into the hands of the Black and brown communities wherever we go and how can she use her tools and talents to shine a light on the businesses of color and platform their stories when so many of the narratives about certain places have been extremely whitewashed.

Just this past summer, Robinson says, “I spent two weeks in Alaska with Travel Alaska and I only interviewed Black and Indigenous Alaskans. I’ve just been extremely curious about our stories.” And this past spring, Robison spent two weeks in California with a videographer “In Chicano neighborhoods and Latinx neighborhoods and Black neighborhoods in LA and San Diego and Palm Springs having those conversations and bringing those neighborhoods to the forefront that you never see in tourism marketing. It’s in the backdrop if it’s even a thought. For us, it’s about talking to those people that are in some ways invisible.”

Black Joy editor and Louisvillian, Minda Honey, chatted with Robinson about the upcoming NOMADNESS festival, BIPOC travelers moving mindfully and what fuels her storytelling.

Travel is typically associated with adventure and being carefree, so I was pleasantly surprised that the agenda for the conference included panels on over tourism and Black folks and people of color moving like colonizers — y’all are not afraid to jump into the discourse! Can you speak to your community’s willingness to have these tough convos?

I think we’re brave because we’re family. You know what I’m saying? The fact that we have a keynote panel and the title is, “Can BIPOC travelers also be colonizers?” White folks aren’t the ones to have that conversation. It’s us talking to us, right? It’s us potentially checking us as we have more disposable income, as we have more of a travel and international based lifestyle. Millennials are really leading the charge with this lifestyle.

We also got to be careful that we’re not perpetuating the same **** — so it’s not a judgment-based panel. It’s not a call to stop, it’s more so a call to action of self-assessment and self-awareness and understanding. “What is my motivation when I move to a place or travel to a place and how am I incorporating the local people, the land? How is all of that playing into the bigger story here?” Because no matter where you go, this is somebody else’s land. It’s just important for me and for my team to make sure that NOMADNESS is having these conversations.

You’ve spoken previously about how you use storytelling to platform and give exposure to some of the Black and brown communities and businesses in the places you travel that really don’t get highlighted because of whitewashing. Do you want to talk a bit about how storytelling brings you joy and what kind of stories you’re obsessed with right now?

Storytelling for me is important because we have to own our own history so that other people don’t come in trying to own and rewrite it for us. I think it’s just very important. Like what NOMADNESS has done is we’ve created a mark in history. If you talk about travel and you talk about travel and the scope of people of color, you cannot not mention us from here forward, right? We’ve done amazing work in that space.

The next level is telling the stories of who are these community members, what are we doing in these places, What type of stuff have we run into? How are we connected even though we’re on opposite sides of the world and what did it take to get here? What are we running up against?

We have to be transparent in that and I find a lot of joy in just being a student and going into other people’s places as a student. I don’t care if I’m a host, I come in as a student and learning and being exposed to a world that I haven’t yet. Being able to use my abilities as a host, as an interviewer, as a personality, as a founder of a community like NOMADNESS. To be able to be like, “Yo, I see you, I see you and I understand the importance of this, even if nobody else does.”

And I think that’s the beautiful picture, because the truth is I’m thinking about, literally about Chicano Park and Museum in San Diego. We’re editing this footage right now and how we’re having the gentrification conversation all over again, except instead of a black neighborhood, it’s a Chicano neighborhood in San Diego. And it’s just like and I set it on camera like I was like, I got pissed. I got pissed to the point I cried.

I’m just tired because I’ve heard this before and it’s not demoting anybody’s experience. It’s literally just the truth, you know. There’s power in seeing one another and owning our stories and making sure that we’re the ones that are telling them.

If you didn’t grow up traveling with your family or didn’t previously have the resources for travel, it can feel hard to figure out how to take that first step. Or maybe you’ve traveled but you’re ready to move beyond all-inclusive resorts. What advice do you have for folks?

It depends on what their barrier to entry is. A lot of times their barrier is fear — Okay, fear of what? And that can look like anything. It could be fear of the language barrier, of actual physical safety, of food. People are scared in a lot of ways to do stuff, but I would say address the fear and whatever the barrier to entry is head on. And try to find the remedy to that.

I think what’s at the guts of it for a lot of people is that they’re scared to do it alone if need be. And so to that I would say join the likes of a NOMADNESS Travel Tribe or other groups like there’s even specialized groups where if diving is your thing, if adventure travel is your thing, if culinary is your thing, there are spaces and places for everybody to be able to have that conversation.

It’s a beautiful it’s a beautiful time to be able to utilize social media because this wasn’t at the hands of our parents, being able to be so accessible. The world is small, social media and the Internet kind of shrinks it. And so being able to have that is really, really important and really powerful. But find your people right, like find your tribe and know that they exist. Trust that they exist.

When I started NOMADNESS, September 2011, I did not know that there were going to be people like this. I did not have a plan of making something this big. Like it could have stuck at the first 100 people and I would have been none the wiser. But it really resonated because it was needed. And not to be like cliché with it, but if you build it, they will come. Your folks will recognize each other and one another.

To learn more about the NOMADNESS festival or begin your travel journey, please visit their website.