The Shinta Mani Foundation – The charity you should know about

Where? The Shinta Mani Foundation, Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Exactly? I was very lucky to be invited to stay at the Shinta Mani Hotel in Siem Reap, over Christmas and during my stay they invited me to visit the Shinta Mani Foundation for the morning.

The Foundation? A Cambodian NGO, the Shinta Mani Foundation is dedicated to supporting local communities by providing vital services, developing schemes to increase human capital, and equipping them with the tools to overcome the constraints of poverty.

When?  December 2017

The Shinta Mani Foundation Charity

The charities main purpose is to ‘Improve the lives of Cambodians by providing opportunities to overcome poverty.’ They have provided the local villagers with jobs in the hotel, from front house to culinary, giving them the opportunity to bring home a salary to support their families. The Shinta Mani Foundation also provides transport for the locals, such as bicycles so that the children can get to school to be educated.

Most recently the Foundation – funded in part by revenue from Shinta Mani hotels together with donations – partnered with Global Dental Relief to bring a group of 16 dentists and volunteers to Shinta Mani Shack, in order to conduct free dental check-ups at local schools for underprivileged students.

It was a very interesting, emotional and enlightening experience for me. The charity works with a lot of the local villages and I had the chance to go to one of them and be part of a day there. I met lots of the women, men and children living in poverty, that the foundation helps and I also helped out with some of their daily activities. Well sort of. Photo above is of one of the much need drinking water wells new to the village.

It was amazing to be able to see first hand, exactly what the charity has achieved since it opened its doors in 2004, and how many lives they have changed.

On top of this the foundation has built new wells and taught the villagers how to do so themselves, in order for hundreds of families to be able to drink clean water. Building a well provides for one village, but teaching the individual how to build the well themselves and providing them with the materials, means that they can use this new skill to create a sustainable job for themselves, as well as building new wells for nearby and surrounding villages.

They have also taught the older generation women how to make useful home items such as rattan matts so that they can go on to sell them as another form of income.

I also learnt the charity supplies free health care and education, funded by the generous donations through the hotel and 100% of these proceeds go directly to the charity too!

The image below shows one of the new brick homes they have built in the village.

Projects such as this are carried out alongside the Shinta Mani Foundation’s ongoing, fundamental work, which centres around the Shinta Mani School of Hospitality. The Hospitality school takes in a carefully chosen group of underprivileged locals yearly and provides them with the knowledge, skills and ‘on the job’ experience, enabling them to gain a job in Siem Reap’s booming hospitality sector. These are opportunities which would have never been available to the individuals if it weren’t for the Foundation.

As things stand the Shinta Mani Foundation success shows 1,400 water wells built, 99 homes constructed, 229 graduates from the school of hospitality who are now employed in the local tourism industry, 641 bicycles donated, 8123 health checkups and 59 micro business loans, as provided to Channary pictured below who set up her first small local shop.

If you would like to find out more about the foundation please click here!

Good bye from Cambodia, next stop Vietnam.

Bon Voyage xx