Marking one year this month, the Direction Knowledge and Cultural Exchange Tour program has traveled for more than ten tours to six different countries.

Direction Tour is one of Special Direction’s corporate social responsibility programs, which aims for a call for peace, knowledge sharing, cultural exchange, youth empowerment, and development and capacity building.

Dr. Shadi Khawandanah, chairman of the board of Special Direction, said that since March 2016, they visited Switzerland, Italy, France, Germany, South Korea and Lebanon and were privy to explore various topics that are close to home — from crisis management to innovation and technology to volunteering. They targeted 26 cities, and occupied 1001 hotel room nights.

With over 10,000 applications flooding in from 88 different cities across 29 countries, two hundred individuals have participated, 18 of which are Al-Majlis members. The intellectual value of Direction Tour is gained not only through the shared platform of the meticulously selected, bright participants, but more so from the knowledge meetings and cultural visits; 401 and 278 in total, respectively.

Extending their conscience to the environment, Direction calculated the CO2 footprint of all its participants’ flights after each tour and offset the emissions through supporting forestation projects, i.e. 3,680 hours in total, 3.312 million kilometers. Moreover, it organized two green tours, which adopted green transportation, of which 1,014 kilometers were on foot.

Due to these cohesive efforts in social responsibility, the Direction Tour program received over 40 commemorations and two distinguished awards in 2016: the King Khaled Award for Competitive Responsibility awarded by Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman, and the European University Corporate Social Responsibility Award, awarded by the former Swiss President Adolf Ogi. — SG