Traveler's Philanthropy

Background

Calabash Tours is a micro enterprise which was established in 1997, and is based in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. The company is a commercial entity, with a strong social agenda. The core business is offering day tours into disadvantaged townships of Port Elizabeth, as part of an informative social history tour. The purpose of the tours is to offer tourists an insight into some of the pertinent developmental and social issues affecting Urban African people, showcasing some of the challenges of the Apartheid past, and the triumphs of our new Democracy. The areas visited host a population of close to half a million people, of which approximately 35 % are unemployed, and 20% HIV positive. The tours are run from a Responsible Tourism perspective, creating economic opportunities for poor communities, as well as understanding the potential negative impacts of tourism within poor communities. The products have been accredited by Fair Trade in Tourism South Africa. Calabash handled approximately 4000 tourists in 2009, and the primary source of visitors comes through large Inbound operators. Calabash Tours also runs Voluntourism Programmes, with a minimum placement duration of 1 month. The areas of focus for Voluntourism are education, and HIV/Aids. Calabash Tours had approximately 75 volunteers in 2009. Lastly, Calabash Tours has several clients with whom we run ‘Charity Challenge” type visits, where infrastructure is developed within under resourced township schools. This programme focuses on sports facilities within township schools. We facilitated two such events in 2009.

Vision:

When the company was started in 1997, the idea was twofold. Firstly to give a balanced, well researched insight into an urban city undergoing a transformation to democracy with the demise of Apartheid. Calabash Tours wanted to ensure tourists got an insight not only into the wonderful scenery and wildlife that South Africa offers, but also understood our human heritage and history to be of value. Furthermore, townships have been perceived as dangerous, and inaccessible, and yet are home to the majority of urban Africans. Omitting Urban Black History from the tourist itinerary appeared to us to be a perpetuation of the Apartheid past .Secondly, we identified that tourism brings economic opportunity to create business linkages within these communities, creating income streams into poor households.

At this stage, we had no idea what Traveler’s Philanthropy was, that it was possible, or even that the concept existed.

The Shift towards Travelers Philanthropy

As we started to take visitors into the township areas as part of our tours, a force was unleashed which we had never anticipated. More and more tourists started to ask questions about supporting some of the projects we visited. These included pre schools, schools, craft initiatives etc. It dawned on us this was an opportunity to direct resources towards these projects. In 1999, a recent immigrant from Scotland, Marion Gate, approached us after tasking a couple of tours with us, about setting up a legal entity for fundraising to support township projects. This was how Calabash Trust was started. In 2000, it was registered as a Not For Profit entity, and was granted legal status. Calabash Trust is a separate legal entity to the tour company, with its own board of trustees. We embarked on the Traveler’s Philanthropy path, at the request of our clients!


I don’t think any of us involved in the beginning had any idea what we were doing, where it would lead, and that we would eventually identify our work as part of the Traveler’s Philanthropy movement.

The Evolution….

Initially, the idea was to tell tourists about the Trust, so any pens, pencils, money, goods, etc they wanted to contribute could be managed, and accounted for. In the early days, we were very much based on a ‘charity model’ of giving. Soon we identified that if we were giving projects money, we needed to be sure they could account for it. Sometimes they lacked capacity to do so. Soon we delivering small, informal workshops on book keeping, or minute keeping, and general administration. Donations were slow in the beginning, and my co founder Marion was also involving friends and family in Scotland to generate small donations.

Some Early Challenges:

How were we going to prevent a dependency situation being created in the projects we were supporting?
How were we going to channel small amounts of money from around the world into our South African bank account, without it being eaten by international bank charges?
How were we going to monitor the progress of the projects?
How would we identify projects?

As time went on, we started to engage in sustainability debates, developmental debates. We started to recognize that simply giving money and goods was not sustainable.
We lost board members, we gained board members, and we kept increasing donations slowly.

In all honesty, we made many mistakes, had great successes, debated, remained passionate, and slowly started to learn about Travelers Philanthropy, Responsible Tourism, and look at best practice models. What we realized, with time, is that many of our challenges were common to other people trying to do the same thing. We were on the cutting edge, and not alone. This was a relief!



Progression

With time, from humble beginnings, we were able to start employing staff. Administrators to write emails of thanks, to write updates, to keep our small pool of donors informed. And then a field worker to monitor and engage with our projects. The funding for these jobs came from one of our clients, Saga Holidays, who has an extensive Charitable Foundation.

As we grew, we identified the need to limit our scope, to become more developmental, less charity driven, and the need to monitor and evaluate our impact. Today Calabash Trust has 6 full time staff, and has a very clear focus of impacting on Schools in the Townships of Port Elizabeth and surrounding areas. We support 8 schools, and have 6 Programme areas: School support and Advancement, Pre School Support, Nutrition, Skills Development, Micro Enterprise development and Internal Learning and Growth.

Each of these programmes has a range of projects, but all target schools, either pupils, teachers, or parents.

Some New Challenges

As we grew our scope of work as Calabash Trust, we came to recognize that sustainable, innovative projects required higher capital input. Traveler’s philanthropy is not always sustainable. (But which development aid is?) Amounts generated are often from many small donors, many of whom have no understanding of development. One of the key challenges has been to remain needs focused, and not donor driven. We still struggle with this, but its getting better and we are getting firmer about sticking to our operational plans, and not the wishes of donors.
As a result of the need for capital input into some of our more ambitious projects, we started to court formal donors within the NGO sector. Today, our income is a mix of Travelers Philanthropy and Donor funding. But Travelers Philanthropy remains very much at the heart of our vision.

Another challenge has been marrying the tensions between the commercial imperative of Calabash Tours, and the Developmental imperative of Calabash Trust. The two are symbiotic, intertwined, but separate, with separate agendas. Walking that line has not always been easy. But through a strong ethical understanding, a strong Trust board of trustees, much debating and deliberating, the two remain in a healthy, mutually beneficial ‘marriage’

Some Solutions

Today, we have a Calabash Trust UK, through which money is channeled to Calabash Trust SA. We have found organizations like SA Partners in the USA, who are able to assist with getting money to us, cost effectively. This also allows donations to be  tax deductible. We have found the UK based Travel Pledge NGO a very effective way of creating income for targeted causes.

Today we have a Tours/Trust committee, which engages regularly, ensuring common purpose in the work of the Trust. The developmental imperative, and the commercial imperative of each is respected, with a ongoing seeking of common ground and mutual synergy.

Our guides are well briefed on the Trust projects, and gently feed this information into tour commentary. Trust brochures are always on our busses. But it’s done with great subtly and caution. And yet it generates income.

In addition, the Trust has understood that acknowledged donors become long term friends, and efforts are made to ensure we honour the commitment of the givers intention.


Voluntourism

Three years ago, it seemed a logical step to move our focus from ‘treasure’ of donors, to include ‘talent and time’. We launched a self funding, responsible volunteering programme, which has been of great benefit to our projects. We found a partner in the UK, People and Places, who shared our vision of responsible tourism, and Travelers Philanthropy.
One of the great benefits has been the more accurate needs identification by this kind of traveler, spending a month within the community, and also the levels of inspiration with which they go back to there own communities. This has generated an effective skills transfer, but also a lot of treasure for projects.

Critical Success Factors

We have always worked in an honest, transparent way. Both in terms of the relationships with communities, projects, Calabash Tours, Calabash Trust and donors. When you don’t have all the answers, this is important.

We have a strong board of trustees at Calabash Trust, and Calabash Tours and Trust have a shared vision.

We sought effective and meaningful partners, and placed trust in people abroad, like Calabash Trust UK.

We developed a reflective culture, looking at what worked, and what did not. Dogma has no place here!

We honour the desire of our donors, both big and small, to help serve the poor communities. We never anticipated the willingness from those far from us, to continue to champion our cause of social and economic justice.

We understand that ordinary people can, and do have a valuable contribution to make to development.

So what do we generate through travelers Philanthropy?

2008/2009    2009/2010
Individual contributions    115 000 US$    86 000 US$
Travel Company Donations    25 000 US $    23 000 US$
2 x soccer fields, 1x netball court in schools. (charity challenge)    8000 US $    25 000 US %
Second Hand shipments of school furniture    5 x 20 ft containers
value approx 35 000 US$    9 x 20 ft containers
value approx 65 000 USD$

We have not yet worked out a good measurement of the countless hours of ‘time’ that is given by our volunteers. The ‘project contribution” which is costed into our volunteer programmes is also not included in these figures. This figure is in he region of 60 000 US$, but is included in volunteer package costs.



Benefits to Calabash Tours.

This journey started with a small tour company with a vision. Briefly, the benefits have been as follows:
Calabash Tours has received considerable mileage from township residents as a result of the work of Calabash Trust. This has enhanced our clients experience in the townships, where they are valued, and welcomed.
The positive spin offs from Travelers Philanthropy have helped to off set some of the negative impacts within communities. Ie Community residents value tourism, and see a benefit in having visitors come to the area, off setting invasion of privacy issues.
The additional income channeled through Calabash Trust, has allowed Calabash Tours to ‘punch above its weight” within the tourism community.
Calabash Tours has been able to leverage positive marketing from these initiatives.
Calabash Tours is seen as credible to its values and philosophy of serving the poor. We have a tangible, measurable track record.
Calabash Tours has truly made an impact around poverty alleviation and social development in the townships of Port Elizabeth.

Conclusion

While we ‘accidentally’ became part of the Traveler’s Philanthropy movement, this would never had happened had we not operated from a strong Responsible Tourism ethic. It has not been an easy road, and at times has consumed vast amounts of time, time which could have been given to Calabash Tours. We believe our story of travelers Philanthropy is inspiring in terms of what a micro enterprise can do, and inspiring in terms of the goodwill, and understanding of common humanity displayed by our visitors and clients. Sustainability remains a challenge, but we do not believe Travelers Philanthropy needs to be measured differently to other forms of development, where sustainability challenges have existed and been debated for many years, with sometimes better practice, but with the concept remain by and large an aspiration of development practioners.

Copyright: Calabash Tours 2010 l Author: Paul Miedema - This article may not be used without permission from Calabash Tours.