Social Responsibility
When you work in a large corporate organisation, sometimes it isn’t easy to feel you are contributing to making the world a better place. Here are a couple of ways I’ve tried to do my bit.
Wiggle for Westmead.
In Australia, I set up Carnival’s strategic partnership with The Children’s Hospital at Westmead (Sydney, NSW). The ‘Wiggle for Westmead’ program was rolled out across all cruises, 60 a year, that departed from Australia. This fund-raising initiative invited guests to join a ‘Wiggle’ party, purchase a ticket and T-Shirt, with all proceeds donated to the hospital.
As a result of fundraising efforts, Carnival was made a Platinum partner of the hospital. Donations funded vital equipment including ventilators and bedside monitors for critically ill and at-risk newborns, a dietitian and music therapy.
As the Carnival extended to Queensland, I created a new partnership, with The Children’s Hospital Foundation, in Queensland, creating a tighter relevance to the Queensland guests who would set sail from Brisbane and want to support their own local community.
Inspired by The Global Soap Project
In 2018, I attended a conference, and was lucky to see Derreck Kayongo, founder of The Global Soap Project.
Derreck’s presentation was highly engaging starting with his first day in America, taking a shower in his hotel, discovering different kinds of soap in his room: hand soap, body soap, etc. He wondered what happened to all the wasted soap, realising it just got thrown out.
Inspired by his experience as a refugee that many dis-advantaged communities go without soap, he created an aid organization that collects discarded soap from hotels, reprocesses and distributes it to vulnerable people around the globe, fighting hygiene-related disease.
It became immediately clear to me that the project was only being run with hotels. Having seen the amount of ‘soap waste’ on board ships, I realised there was an additional opportunity.
I pulled together the compelling details of Kayongo’s presentation to a proposal for the Carnival Cruise Line Sustainability team in Miami.
I had little expectation but a good degree of hope that I would get their attention, particularly as cruise lines need to ensure they are on the front foot when it comes to the environment.
In July 2019, I got the exciting news that a Soap recycle program would be rolled out across all ships, via ‘Clean the World’ in the U.S and ‘Soap Aid’ from Australia.
Soap Aid’s Mike Matulick: “The partnership with Carnival is a unique opportunity for Soap Aid to expand its recycling program into the wider travel and accommodation industry and build on a platform which has already reached over 270,000 people globally. Half of the 1.5 million children that die from preventable diseases in the poorest countries every year could be saved by the use of handwashing with soap. The economic and social impact of this is huge.”
Watch Derreck Kayongo if you get the chance. He inspired me.
UNICEF Australia
In 2009 I managed the UNICEF account at an advertising agency in Sydney.
I ran the High Value Donor program, which supported among many projects, polio vaccination in Bangladesh.
Inspired by UNICEF’s work and wanting to learn more, I volunteered and paid my travel expenses to accompany my client on a field trip to Dhaka in Bangladesh and chaperone some of the High Value Donors who wanted to see where their donations were going.
Mujinjike School, Murewa, Zimbabwe
At the age of 18, I spent a year living and working in rural Zimbabwe, teaching at a secondary school in Murewa, a very small village in Mashonaland East district.
As well as teaching at the school, I managed a project to bring running water to the village and also established a library at the school.
