About Malia Everette

AltruVistas founder Malia Everette has over three decades of experience creating regenerative travel experiences. In over 80 countries, she’s powered in-depth cultural and educational exchanges for organizations, foundations, universities, high schools and middle schools, families, friend groups, and individuals—always believing in the power of travel as a transformative tool for social change.

Malia founded AltruVistas in 2013 as an antidote to commercial tourism that extracts from rather than benefits host communities and economies, and with the belief that travelers are citizen diplomats. She draws on a vast network of partners around the globe to create journeys focused on human rights, political economy, sustainability and environment, food systems, arts and culture, gender issues, and the resilience of indigenous peoples. From 1997-2012, Malia directed and diversified the popular Reality Tours program for Global Exchange. She has been a voice against human trafficking in the tourism industry since 2000.

Malia holds an MA in International Relations from San Francisco State University, and has lectured on ecotourism as a faculty member within its Tourism and Recreation Management program. She regularly mentors, teaches, and speaks about how to build equitable tourism models, and has written numerous articles about socially-responsible travel, including two coauthored academic articles on capital flight in the travel industry (LINK to our capital flight page). In conjunction with the UNWTO, she contributed to The Blue Pages: A Directory of Companies Rated by Their Politics and Practices, and coauthored the chapter “The Commodification of the Sacred” in Religious Tourism in Asia and the Pacific.

Malia cofounded California’s Richmond Progressive Alliance and served as a Human Rights Commissioner for Contra Costa County. She serves on the boards of Ethical Traveler and Witness for Peace Southwest, and has been on the boards of FoodFirst!, THRIVE-Gulu, and Bay Area Green Tours. As an ethical travel consultant, she’s worked with Women’s Earth Alliance, anti-human trafficking groups Not For Sale, ECPAT, and MISSSEY, and with many established and emerging tourism companies.

Malia has two well-traveled adult sons. She loves salsa dancing and jazz. When she isn’t traveling, she’s at work building a biodiverse, off-grid homestead and food forest with her chickens and bees on Hawai‘i Island. Her life’s work is to weave relationships between peoples, and to enact social justice with love.