Next week a team of twelve Datacom leaders will travel to the remote town of Ban Long Lao Mai, near Luang Prabang in Laos, where they will spend a week supporting a local community making a difference.
Their visit is part of Datacom’s Leadership for Life programme and will build on their graduate course undertaken with the Macquarie University Graduate School of Management in the previous year.
Their experience will be supported by World Volunteer, an organisation committed to facilitating volunteer and educational based projects in South East Asia.
The team will be assisting the village to build ECO-bungalows. The building process will involve molding bricks from local materials, painting, preparing the garden/playground, and building furniture. The project will enable the village to generate income through tourism, supplementing what they currently earn through selling rice, a limited salable resource for the village.
In addition, the team will engage with the children of the village and deliver a series educational based sessions, imparting knowledge of the English language, sport, caring for the environment and general knowledge to the younger members of the village.
The team will stay with host families and have the opportunity to truly experience a culture very different from their own.
This is the second Datacom group to participate in the Leadership for Life program. In 2011 a group of nine leaders spent a week with the Bunong Hill Tribe in remote Cambodia.
The Leadership for Life programme was developed to continue the legacy of Michael Browne, Datacom’s late Group CEO who passed away suddenly in July 2010. In 2007, he established the Datacom Corporate Responsibility programme in pursuit of making a difference in the communities we service.