What is Sailing for Good?
Sailing for Good, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation with the single vision of giving everyone on Earth the chance to see the world differently through all facets of sailing and the lifestyle it inspires. The new perspective can come literally from standing on deck and looking back onto familiar land from the ocean for the first time, experiencing personal solitude on the vast, powerful–often unforgiving–sea on a multi-day offshore passage, or figuratively through simply reading the stories or watching the documentary videos of past adventures, learning vicariously from what others have learned.
Who Do We Serve?
The company strives to make this opportunity equally available to all people, but with a focus on under-served communities and those recovering from or still enduring the grips of cancer, substance abuse/addiction, physical, mental, or other health disorders. Sailing for Good seeks to enrich your life through adventure, challenge, and self-discovery while immersing you in exciting experiences in new places with cultures unlike your own. We subsidize or completely cover trips for qualifying participants, while also providing the same opportunities to paying adventurers, whose funds–100% of them–get directly reinvested back into the operation to subsidize the efforts serving those in need.
How Does It Work?
Over several years of sailing, founder Tommy Schaeffer has built a strong network of colleagues–sailors with a wide range of skill levels, certifications and sailing lifestyles. Some of these sailors are experienced skippers who sail recreationally while others captain their own charter companies full-time with years of experience sailing in all weather conditions over hundreds of thousands of nautical miles. Sailing for Good works to match qualified candidates with participating sailing captains based on a number of factors including–but not limited to–location, timing, need, and most importantly, the level of sailing difficulty and risk they seek.
Then, Sailing for Good subsidizes–in full or in-part–the cost of the sailing experience including any travel expenses required to get the stakeholder to/from the location of the boat and the comfort of their home.
Where Does It Happen?
The team of sailors committed to Sailing for Good is widely composed of liveaboard sailors and couples who are living aboard their sailboat full-time and constantly sailing to new locations. Therefore, our network of charter companies, individual captains and recreational sailors not only exists worldwide, but is also collectively available from new locations perpetually. This makes it easy to support individuals in regions one season who we may not have been able to serve in earlier. Sailing seasons and weather windows are often not year-long in any given region, but with a widely dispersed network, it’s always sailing season somewhere with Sailing for Good! This makes providing the experience to those in need easy, as our service availability is year-round and our service area truly is the entire planet Earth–well, the wet parts of it.