About Me

Up until 2009, I was your typical 20-something: trying to understand who I was and discovering how that fit into our big, wide world. I had spent the previous four years completing a degree in marketing and working as a copywriter in a prominent agency in the Dominican Republic.

Although I enjoyed my job and was earning well, I began asking myself if this was truly the path for me. Eventually, I did a course on social marketing during my last semester of my degree and discovered that I had a passion for social change.

This is where things changed.

Inside the plenary sessions of the Conference of the Parties (COP16) in Cancún, Mexico.

Working with 350.org blew open the doors of everything I thought I knew. I was fortunate to travel to multiple countries across the Caribbean and Latin America. These experiences exposed me to the real world.

I learned about the struggles of indigenous communities fighting oil and gas development in the Amazon of Peru and Bolivia.

I discovered a community of like-minded youth who actually gave a shit about the future we were being left with and fought to demand a better one.

With the 350.org team and Bill McKibben during a strategy session while attending the Conference of the Parties (COP16) in Cancun, Mexico.

I saw, first-hand, the challenges of agreeing to a binding climate agreement when leaders of 193 countries are put together in a conference room.

Plenary session for the Conference of the Parties (COP16) in Cancun, Mexico.

I finally caught a glimpse into what I was put on this Earth to do.

In 2010, I decided to change careers and complete environmental studies overseas. Suddenly, I was uprooting my life and moving to the other side of the world to pursue this dream of mine. I arrived to Brisbane, Australia in 2011, enrolled as an undergraduate student in a B.Sc. of Environmental Science.

Officially graduating as an environmental scientist!

I had never lived out of home before and suddenly, here I was: immersed in a new sense of independence, experiencing new cultures, places and people. I was choosing my own path every single day. Living in Australia came with its ups and downs. I missed my family but I was also forced to forge my own character. I embarked on new adventures with people from countries I didn’t even know existed.

I ticked off a major bucket list item when I went scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef.

I volunteered with Reef Check Australia and the Australian Institute of Marine Science, monitoring the health of reefs across South East Queensland.

Laying transect lines as a volunteer with the Australian Institute of Marine Science. Photo by AIMS.

I took countless road trips and…discovered a passion for exploring our natural world.

Simultaneously, my degree was revealing to me a world of unprecedented environmental degradation and social injustice. I travelled overseas to Bali, Japan, New Zealand, India. These experiences exposed me to the raw, beautiful and vulnerable realities of our world. Not only was I witnessing first-hand what I was learning about at university but also seeing the contrast and inequalities of societies in developing and developed countries.

I saw the lack of environmental education that is prevalent among many societies. I felt heartbreak at the sight of so much plastic waste polluting pristine natural places…

…and did something about it.

Picking up plastic from the beach during one of the beach cleanup events I organised in Dominican Republic.

Slowly, my already-established travel bug evolved from “I want to travel the world” to “I want to use travel as a mechanism to make a difference in the world”.

And that’s how Intego Travel was born.

These days I am enrolled in a PhD, studying how we can implement regenerative development in the context of the visitor economy — aka, tourism.

In July 2020, I graduated from my Masters of Environment, majoring in Climate Change Adaptation. My dissertation explored the complex relationship between ecotourism and poaching using a Human Ecology and systems thinking approach, to explore if the former can mitigate the latter.

I used to spend most of my days working full time as a Sustainability Officer in tertiary education in a university in Brisbane, Australia, while working on Intego Travel on the side.

Today, I work as the Regional Sustainability Manager for Asia Pacific for a multi-national company in the built environment, while building my consultancy, Intego Consulting, where I help purpose-driven organisations build sustainability, social impact, and regenerative principles into their operations.

I have come to understand that we cannot love and protect what we don’t know.

And so that’s what I aim to do with this site: