The Falls Resort won the Award for Best Social Involvement and Best Practice – Economic Impact
on January 18, 2012
Helping the community
Recently the Awards were announced by Imvelo, the organisation which promotes responsible tourism. The Royal Livingstone and the Zambezi Sun (The Falls Resort) won the award for Best Social Involvement and Best Practice – Economic Impact. The Falls Resort have won before, but, even so, they were delighted to have won again.
The reason that The Falls Resort continue to win is because of the way they run their projects. The Falls Resort will never support a project that cannot be self-sustaining. After an initial input of capital expense and staff training, The Falls Resort expect the members of the project to run it on their own.
The Community Projects Manager, Stain Musangaila, continually visits the projects offering advice and encouragement.And will help in financial terms if the project looks as if it is about to fail.
The farming project for the blind community initially helped them with tools, a water pump and seedlings. The Falls Resort also put up a greenhouse where they could grow tomatoes and peppers as a communal effort. The money raised from the greenhouse is used to pay for electricity for the pump and any remaining amount can be used in times of crisis.
The blind community did have a crisis a while ago. The greenhouse was visited by a herd of elephant which ate their way through row upon row of vegetables. What the elephants did not eat they trampled. Stain was there as soon as possible to give them support. Stain said “Don’t worry. We have some seedlings ready for planting. Get the fields tidied up and I’ll make sure that the new plants arrive first thing tomorrow.”
At the hospice The Falls Resort also set up a garden where family members and staff can grow vegetables for the hospice and for sale to The Falls Resort.
Children in their school uniform
At one of our school projects The Falls Resort empowered the mothers by buying sewing machines and giving them some of our old linen and staff uniforms which the mothers use for making school uniforms and items for sale.
Every project has to be thoroughly researched before The Falls Resort will give the go ahead for any financial input. The research is done to make sure that the people who receive our support should also gain in terms of an income to feed themselves and also to gain in self-esteem.
The Falls Resort believe in the saying about giving a man a fish and he will eat for one day, or teach a man to fish and he will eat forever.That is our philosophy and it seems to be the right one.
