Leo grew up in a town of 2,000 people near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. She had never been on a plane. She didn't know how to swim. And she had decided — with the quiet, settled conviction of someone who has thought about one thing for a long time — that she was going to Cologne, Germany to learn German.
In episode two of the Finn Wardman World Explorer Fund podcast, we sit down with Leo Peredia, the very first recipient of a WEF travel grant. She talks about how a dream she'd been carrying for years collided with a $7,500 grant that covered her flight, her housing, and a six-month intensive German course. She talks about what it's like to arrive in Europe with no frame of reference for any of it — the trains, the grey weather, the grocery stores where no one helps you bag your shopping. She talks about learning to swim, in her twenties, in Germany of all places.
And she talks about what happened to her on the other side.
The Dream Was Specific
Leo didn't apply for a travel grant because she wanted to travel. She applied because she wanted to learn German. She had been studying on her own for years, pulling it up on her phone between shifts, and she had set herself a target: C1 proficiency. Most people would have chosen a cheaper country. Leo chose Cologne. That specificity is what made her application land.
This is the pattern we see again and again with grantees who get funded. A grant application that names the thing — the city, the course, the dates, the outcome — reads completely differently from one that asks for money to "see the world." Leo's ask was clean. $1,400 for flights. Course fees. Housing. A number we could evaluate and say yes to.
Then the Scary Part
She had never flown. Her family had never flown. She didn't own a passport until the grant money came through. In the episode she talks about the night before her flight — sitting with her small packed bag, running through everything for the fourteenth time, thinking about what happens if the plane actually does what planes do.
It did. She landed in London. Got on another plane to Hamburg. Got on a train to Cologne. Checked into her housing. Started class on Monday.
Six months later she was living her life in German. And — this is the part she laughs at hardest in the interview — she had learned to swim. The German friends she'd made kept inviting her to lakes, and eventually she ran out of reasons not to get in the water. She learned to swim in her second language.
What She Became
Leo came back different. Not in a performative way. In a quiet, load-bearing way. She's on the WEF selection committee now, which means she's one of the people reading grant applications and deciding who gets funded next. She hosts travellers through Couchsurfing at her place in Mexico — a direct paying-it-forward from the hospitality she was shown in Europe.
The most useful thing she says in the episode, and the reason we made her first-ever grantee: she stopped being an over-planner. She used to need the spreadsheet, the fallback, the fallback's fallback. Germany broke that habit. She learned that most of what you're afraid of evaporates the moment you're actually standing in the middle of it.
If This Sounds Like You
The Finn Wardman World Explorer Fund gives travel grants to young people aged 18–25 with a specific dream and a plan to match. We don't fund holidays. We fund the training, the language course, the athletic goal, the cultural exchange — the thing that will change you on the way through.
If Leo's story sounds like a version of yours, you know what to do.
Watch WEF Podcast Ep. 2 above, or on the World Explorer Fund YouTube channel. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're ready to write an application, start here.