Turtle Island Resort donates $10k supplies to Nacula District
Turtle Island Resort donated school supplies worth $10,000 to the district of Nacula in the Yasawa Islands.
The donation will support the 342 school children in the district for the year.
Resort managing director and chief executive officer, Richard Evanson Jr, said the resort realised the importance of continuing to invest in the education of our local community.
“We could only imagine the concerns every parent would have faced about how they will provide the educational tools and supplies their children needed, when many have gone without paid work for close to 12 months,” he said.
“Things will improve, and we don’t want our children to fallen behind as a result of this pandemic”.
Having to live in the community his whole life, the resort director knows many of the families on a personal level.
“We couldn’t just sit back and do nothing. We have always believed that if you are able to help, you should. Given the impacts of this crisis on our own business, we’ve certainly had to think of creative ways to assist others,”he said. In addition to the assistance given, the resort has been supporting its local community in any way possible since the global pandemic. Efforts have included the opening of a bartering system with the villages as a mean to acquire fuel and other supplies.
The resort has also supplied food, fishing and farming equipment worth more than $75,000 to families as part of the resort’s COVID-19 food relief initiative.
Mr Evanson Jr said it was the generous donations from the guests that helped alleviate food insecurity for more than 370 families in the community.
His staff had wrapped stationery
packages for each child which included notebooks, pens, coloured pencils, erasers, sharpeners, glue sticks, binders and rulers.
On the first day of school, staff members from the resort with the
help of the Nanuya Express boat, delivered the supplies to each of the four schools in the community.