I inherited a wider horizon.
I was born in Haiti and grew up low-income in Brooklyn, in a family where international travel was not something I could assume would be part of my life.
But travel changed the boundaries of what I thought was possible, through scholarships, study abroad, work, an international MBA, and eventually a life built across countries and cultures. For Lilia is for the girl I could have been, and for everyone coming after me who deserves the same chance to see more of the world, imagine more for themselves, and go farther than they thought possible.
For Lilia comes from the women in my family whose movement made my own movement possible.
Who do you do it for?
For Lilia is about taking the leap, not only for yourself, but for everyone whose world you carry with you. The version of you who might never have gone if a few doors hadn't opened. The people in your life who can't go yet. The ones who never got the chance.
For my grandmother, who passed before she could leave the country.
For the child I left in my home country to build us a better life.
For the girl I used to be, who never imagined she'd get this far.
The first domino wasn’t mine. My grandmother Lilianne and her sister Elizabeth dared to imagine a life beyond Haiti, and because they moved, I arrived in the U.S. at six months old, where a different set of doors opened to me. From there, one open door led to the next: scholarships, boarding school, my first trip abroad to Spain in high school, studying in Sydney, Abu Dhabi and Ghana, and eventually a life built across six continents and more than 50 countries, and counting. I’ve studied, worked and lived abroad, spent two years on the road, and now call Spain home. Travel changed how I see the world, and I learned to do it well from scratch, not from privilege.
But I’m not an exception to the rule. I was chosen from a pool of equally deserving students. I often think about the girl I’d have been had I grown up in Haiti: not a lesser life, just a different one, with different doors. Curiosity and big dreams are everywhere; access to the world isn’t. Everyone behind me could easily have been me. So at every table I sit at, my mission is to lower the barrier for the next person, the way Lilianne and Elizabeth lowered it for me. And every trip is built the way I learned to travel: slowly, locally, and with the people who know a place best.
To create transformative travel experiences that expand horizons, strengthen local communities, and redistribute opportunity — so the privilege of seeing the world can open doors for more people.
A world where travel is not limited to the privileged few, where marginalized people are included in joy and possibility, and where tourism creates reciprocal value for travelers and the communities they enter.
Our Value
For Lilia is not simply a group-tour operator with a donation attached. For Lilia is built on a simple idea: each journey should open more than one door. We create small-group trips that expand the world of the people taking them, while building a share of every journey into helping someone else experience more of the world for themselves.