The Commitment of DMC South Africa Sustainability
Corporate social responsibly:
We have an inhouse CSR consultant from whom we can draw insights and inspiration.
We support women:
Our staff compliment is made of majority women, we permanently employ 21 women and 4 men.
We provide young people with internship opportunities:
We incorporate tourism students from Cape Town into our international congresses whereby they receive exposure to the inner workings of congresses as well as financial renumeration.
We provide 1 – 2 internships to young people from abroad to work at our company for 6 months to gain experience in meetings, incentives, conferences and events.
We support education
We donate to The Amy Foundation (formerly Amy Biehl Foundation) in the Western Cape is a non-profit organisation that offers programmes which develop and empower youth, ages 5 – 35. The youth lives in challenging communities. These after school programme provides environments that allows children to overcome shortcomings in their education.
We support children:
Our company makes annual financial donations to an organisation called The home of hope. The organisation provides a ‘place of safety’ for children who were abandoned in dustbins to die, violently abused, raped, hungry and neglected due to poverty, infected with HIV and AIDS and those who were born bearing the effects of excessive drug and alcohol abuse by their mothers during pregnancy.
We support the elderly:
Our company annually donates approximately 50 “Santa shoe boxes” filled with toiletries to old age homes throughout Cape Town.
We are implementing a quarterly soup kitchen which feeds 48 elderly people at an old age home situated in our nearby community.
We support the poor:
We have clothing drives whereby we encourage our staff, their friends and families to donate any old clothing which we can in turn donate to the poor.
We recycle:
Our company’s paper recycling and nonorganic waste from our kitchen is donated monthly to Oasis. Oasis Special School provides education for learners with intellectual disability who were excluded from mainstream schooling. As the children grew older, there was the challenge of where they would be able to work, with many failed attempts to place them into the formal job market. In response, they opened the Oasis Protective Workshop, a supportive environment where the children could transition from school into a job. Over the years, other projects and services for people with Intellectual disability have been added, and today Oasis is one of the largest and most impactful organisations of its kind, not just in the Western Cape but nationally.
We use less water:
Through the lessons learnt from the recent water scarcity in Cape Town, we have collectively elevated levels of consciousness to be more waterwise, Cape Town’s expected water consumption is below its actual consumption as we have new found respect for water as a resource.
Sustainability Activities
Ways to incorporate CSR activities
We incorporate CSR activities into our incentive programmes:
We encourage our clients to support the development of sustainable vegetable gardens.
Most recently one of our clients spent a fun filled day of giving back to the Delft community in Cape Town by revamping their entire creche.
Local content and people:
We incorporate local content and people into our programmes, local dinner venues and resource demonstrate our local talent and offers financial support in this manner.
We source local sustainable gifting which supports employment initiatives for women and developing communities.
Donations:
We ask our clients to bring with any old books and clothing that could possibly be donated once they reach South Africa.
Any surplus stationary and paper that we have left over after conferences are donated to primary schools throughout Cape Town.
We encourage our clients to donate to grass roots projects and / or causes geared toward social investment.
Projects by DMC South Africa Sustainability
Environmental sustainability:
We are implementing an initiative to plant 1 tree for every 1 guest that visits Southern Africa.
We strive to minimise the use of plastic as much as possible, this includes plastic in gifting as well as plastic bags and plastic straws.
We have moved away from using plastic water bottles to instead offering our guests refreshment stations and reusable water bottles.
We print our custom made menus on recycled paper but generally we are striving towards moving away from printing and become more digital focussed.
Minimize food production:
We minimize food production wherever possible and 90% of the restaurants that we support source food locally from responsible and sustainable farms and communities.
Leftover food from functions are donated to the poor.
Conservation:
We support general conservation initiatives such as our Rhinos which are an endangered species.
We also encourage our clients to support conservations initiatives.