ABOUT barry
Barry Hoffner
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Barry grew up in a middle-class Jewish-Iraqi household in Southern California. A chance backpacking trip to Europe with a friend after high school changed the trajectory of his life and gave him direction for how he wanted to live his life: Seeing the world.
His first career, after graduating with his MBA from Columbia University took him all over the world during sixteen years, living and working in Buenos Aires, Paris, Tokyo, Singapore, London, Zurich, Mexico and Moscow.
He even spent almost two years on the road with his late wife Jackie, before kids, on an extended sabbatical traveling through India, South East Asia, living in Kunming, China and then a five-month overland trip through Africa from Nairobi to Cape Town. After his last posting in Russia, Barry, Jackie and his boys Benjamin and Daniel settled in Sausalito, Northern California. Barry left Investment Banking to farm wine-grape vineyards and an olive orchard and farmed them for the next ten years. During this time, he took a bucket-list trip in 2010 to Timbuktu and being inspired by the desert, people, culture and music, launched a 501c3 charitable foundation to provide access to education for the youth. Since then, his foundation, Caravan to Class, has built and supported 18 French-speaking schools and has expanded to providing scholarships to young women from West Africa, both university and English-language scholarship under the Bourse Jackie programs (The Jackie scholarships) in his late wife’s name.
Since losing Jackie in a tragic accident in Botswana, in 2017, after a period of a deep inner search, Barry left most of what he had been doing, and turned to travel as a way of healing. Belonging to the World chronicles his journey to every country on earth and uncovers how he found healing and regained his place in the world from the countless people he met along his journey.
Barry feels fortunate to be the father of two outstanding young men, who embody Jackie’s spirit of kindness. Benjamin is an economic researcher at Yale University and bound for Law School and Daniel is a Marin County wildland firefighter.
Barry REFLECTS ON HIS TRAVELS
- We honor those we’ve lost by embodying the qualities that admired in them, like Jackie’s kindness and open-heartedness.
- The First Step towards helping a stranger can have a profoundly positive impact on how you see yourself in the world.
- We can best rediscover purpose after loss by pushing beyond our comfort zones and self-limiting ideas.
- Challenging preconceived ideas about places and seeing with your own eyes increases the feeling of connecting with humanity.
- The world, even some of the most perceived dangerous places, is so much more beautiful and its people so much better than portrayed in the press.
Barry's Book
More than just a collection of compelling globetrotting stories, Belonging to the World captures the thrill of evolving into a bolder traveler step by step, the power of releasing limiting narratives we often have about lesser-known countries, and the awe of forming profound connections with people from entirely different worlds—often without a shared language. This isn’t a journey of sorrow but an inspiring testament to finding purpose after loss, living fully at any age, and learning what it means to belong to this world.
A Quest to Every Country on Earth in Search of Healing, Connection, and Renewed Purpose after Loss
BELONGING TO
THE WORLD
