It all started with a little one-year bike ride across Europe and North Africa. In 2008 Jenn Sutherland-Miller set off, with her husband and four children, on what would develop into a decade-long, open-ended world tour encompassing six continents and over forty countries. They've journeyed across Europe and North Africa on bicycles, the length and breadth of North and Central America, gone deep instead of wide in Guatemala, backpacked across the mountains and rivers of Southeast Asia, Borneo and Indonesia, and they’ve thoroughly road tripped Australia and New Zealand. The girls dove into the muddy Amazon and the majestic sacred valley in Peru, while the guys sailed their boat from Canada to the Bahamas and back over nine months. Those are just their family adventures. As a strong advocate for solo female travel, Jenn has walked a thousand kilometers across France and Spain, traversed the length of the Egyptian Nile, slurped ramen in Narita, chicken bussed Central America, saved the life of a drowning man in laguna Apoyo, and crashed a motorbike in Nicaragua. She’s traveled with newborns through teens whom she worldschooled from day one clear to college.
An early adopter of the digital nomad movement, Jenn has spent her career working at the intersection of education and adventure. With a degree in education, she works with families to design custom worldschooling programs and, very selectively, as a life coach. She is the Editor for two travel-related publications, has helped design the best backpack for urban travel, and is the co-founder of the Travel Access Project, a non-profit dedicated to getting a Gap Year on every resume by expanding opportunity through grants and educational resources. She volunteers her time with Konojel, an organization dedicated to solving the root causes of malnutrition in Guatemala, and is the director of the board of the Genesis Community for the Arts, providing arts education to children in Guatemala and Honduras. Together with her friend Keri, she wrote the book Bottles to Backpacks: The Gypsy Mama's Guide to REAL Travel With Kids a cradle to college primer on every aspect of child-life on the road for families who want more than a two-week vacation with their children. She also speaks and writes widely on transformative travel, education, and living life on your terms.
For fun, Jenn climbs volcanos, gets muddy in rainforests, hikes to hidden waterfalls, SCUBA dives spectacular reefs, swing dances in the kitchen, swings from aerial silks, reads incessantly, bakes bread, creates community for lonely people, travels as much as she possibly can, with and without her family, and once rode off into the sunset with an Arab horseman. Jenn has bet all of her chips on transformative travel as the best way to change the world, through developing understanding, compassion, and courage. To that end she leads trips for women to developing countries, advocates tirelessly for data-driven decision-making over a life ruled by fear, and seeks to inspire and empower women, specifically, to live lives of heroic proportions, at home and abroad.
