The Matcha Initiative
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Dutch by birth, cosmologist by training, and educator and international educational author by profession, I opened LooLa Adventure Resort in 2000, which went on to become the world’s most decorated eco-resort. Leveraging these eco-awards, and spurred on by the preventable death of Loola’s cook's daughter, LooLa’s team initiated the Safe Water Garden concept in 2015. Together with an ever-growing group of passionate supporters, I drive our mission to bring safe sanitation to the whole world.
Having seen how hard it can be for people with good ideas to get off the ground, I'm happy to help those who have a good idea and are brimming with passion to get it done. I won't answer emails except to say that we can meet via Zoom (or at my home office) to have a chat to get you on your way!
What brought me to sustainability was the preventable death of the 1-year-old daughter of our resort's cook, on account of bad sanitation at her home. This incident propelled us to help solve the world's sanitation crisis.
As the founder and CEO of both LooLa and Safe Water Garden, my mission has been, from the get go, to show that operating as a sustainable business (making sure that all stakeholders benefit, including the environment) is a winning business strategy. We leverage partnerships with people and organisations who share our passions, and don't engage in competition.
As the Indonesians say, if you don't make sure that everyone engaged with your actions is happy, you will continue to have problems. So, the best way to run a business is to make sure that everyone benefits.
To be honest, I haven't encountered many challenges. Ever since opening my business, our sustainability philosophy has brought us a happy business and a good income. My biggest challenge in recent years (aside from COVID-19) has been the fact that I am running the business alone at the top, but I've made steps to address the issue. My wife resigned from her teaching job to join LooLa, and we have found a very good MD who was ready to join us on a profit-sharing basis.
For Safe Water Gardens, it has been a bit more challenging, because the people I look for are highly prized in the market and I've faced the well-known problem of engaging investors with "too small" a ticket size. However, we are now set to raise capital to pay for a top talent management team. The capital-raise deck is almost ready and we believe we have the right network of people to approach so as to raise US$1.5M.
I am most proud to have won an award as the world's best Responsible Tourism Operator, and to have been invited to the UN Water Conference to exhibit as 1 of only 6 examples of a scalable WASH (Water, sanitation and hygiene) solution.