A magical eco journey,
right from your seat ...

Choose the impact you wish to make.
Then bring it to life.

Whether you are a school, company, university or a passionate individual:

You can address any UN SDG that appeals to you: take your pick(s), using the examples below for inspiration (or pick one of our sample packages!). We’ll help you design your experience for maximum impact, connecting you closely to the communities you will e-meet on your journey …

The examples below show you the magic.
We look forward to help you create your journey towards a rich experience and a better world!

Example 1:
Support a local family
(see also video above)

Look at the smile of the mother in this photo…
That’s the impact a simple kitchen sink can make, since her family no longer needs to do the dishes in the toilet.

This option is great for guests who like to build a personal bond with a local family. LooLa’s staff will introduce you via online video, and a new world will open up: Learn what it means to live on € 200 household income per month, learn what life means when water doesn’t flow from the tap, learn what are their dreams and hopes for the future … but also learn what makes Indonesians the most optimistic people on the planet!

Then you can pick (or design) the most impactful way to support – with our staff on hand to translate, advise, and ensure realistic and optimal outcomes. For starters, the family will receive a smartphone with WhatsApp so you can stay in touch as long (or as short) as you want and witness the impact of your actions. Here are some popular ideas:

1. Help a family through the next 6 months of COVID by providing them with daily necessities, including nutritious food. In return, you could learn delicious local recipes from them!
2. Give a family a life-saving sanitation system (Safe Water Garden) that doubles up as a crop garden (see example 5 below for details)
3. Help restore the family home, fix up walls, roofs, windows, maybe renovate the kitchen. Take a tour of the house and decide together!

Discover our shared humanity and change lives –both theirs and yours!– for just € 1,000 (SG$ 1,500), and bring as many family or friends as you want along on your e-visits!

Example 2:
Clean up historic sites & turn Trash to Cash!

Bintan has the longest history in Indonesia, right after Bali. But its gorgeous historic neighbourhoods (built on stilts) are marred by plastic waste…
So here’s a win-win to benefit everyone: you can help the villagers clean up the plastic under their homes and hence restore historic sites to their full glory. At the same time, you can discuss ways to turn Trash to Cash!

In the photo, you see some of the accessories that our local staff made in the past together with our guests. But recently, we discovered an even more exciting way to recycle all the plastic we collect: we can pay the villagers to turn the waste into so-called ocean ecobricks, which are basically plastic bottles stuffed full of waste plastic. We can then use these eco-bricks in our Safe Water Gardens (see example 5), which means that you help create a local business activity that turns trash to cash to lifelong sanitation!

You can fund the plastic clean-up of one (or several) historic family homes, or fund the clean-up of an entire village (you’ll see before-and-after footage and you can witness the clean-up event live!), and you could choose to witness the use of recycled plastic in sanitation systems. Get 15 friends together for SG$ 100 each and clean up and recycle the waste of a whole neighbourhood!

Example 3:
Optimize our renewable energy usage

With the help of a great energetic Singapore start-up, Resync, we installed (solar) energy monitoring devices, and, in the spirit of transparency, you can see here for yourself (just click “sign in” and you’re in).

At the point of writing (May 2020), LooLa runs around 40 – 80% on solar energy, but we believe this can be improved to 100%! Wherever you may be in the world, we invite you to embark on an energy audit of LooLa with our staff. We can give you a list of all the electrical instruments and give you an online tour of LooLa. You could then come up with an energy savings plan and see it play out in real time as our staff will work with you to implement your ideas. You can then figure out if things work as expected (hint: a physicist myself, I have learned that electricity rarely behaves the way you think 😉 ).

There are countless other experiments you can do, correlating weather to energy output etc … so this could be one of your coolest physics experiments ever, the results of which you can apply to your own school, your company, or your own home!

Options: for schools, you could also pair up with a local school in Bintan who does the experiments together with you. You could do lessons on solar energy, differences between solar and grid energy, and link geographical seasonal changes to solar output. You could help design/install solar sets in isolated homes, you could expand the PV capacity so that local homes can also benefit, and so on … The whole experience can be arranged for under € 1,500, so if renewable energy is your thing, come and talk to us!

Example 4:
Be a planet-hero and store your carbon emissions!

You can do better than being carbon-neutral: you could plant so many trees that you offset the carbon emissions for life for yourself and your whole family and thus become a planet-hero!
If you represent a company, we could calculate how many mangrove trees you should plant to offset your organization’s carbon emissions.
Subsequently, you plant the trees together with our staff over the Zoom and see it play out in live-stream or via other digital means.

Our staff can give you regular updates via digital means, and you can keep track of progress. The data collection you do here could prove extremely valuable for mangrove-tree planting projects all across the world (and if you’re a student, you could end up with a really good grade for your bio project or your extended essay 😉 ). So while doing good yourself, you’ll also contribute to global progress.

If you are a student, you could also choose to buddy up with a local school and ask them to do the planting, or engage in extended marine-biology surveys, studying the impact of your planting efforts on marine life ….. Like this, you learn together and improve your intercultural skills at the same time!

Get 5 friends together for SG$ 300 each and join the group of planet heroes, then inspire others to follow your example!

Example 5:
Get involved with Safe Water Gardens

370 Indonesian children die every day on account of bad sanitation at their home; the daughter of our cook was one of them. UNICEF and others had shown after the Aceh Tsunami that a solution existed, so we figure we had to try. Our guests agreed, so we began in 2015.

Students, schools, companies and families helped build the first 500 Safe Water Gardens (SWG) together with LooLa’s staff. This led the Indonesian government to recognize the SWG in March 2020, making it officially the world’s most cost-efficient sanitation system.
Our goal: Safe sanitation for every village family by 2030.

Your target: support one or a few local families, help them design their SWG, see them build it (via WhatsApp video call or other digital means) and check in with them every few weeks to advance our joint knowledge. One of the things we don’t yet understand well is this: some families manage to grow chilli (considered a huge benefit) and some don’t. Can you help find out why this is so? By getting to know the family you help, you can ask questions and find out! If you do, you are making a global impact because your findings will inform the next generation of SWGs.

Options: Fund a single SWG (or an entire village if you’re a company), and we’ll send you footage of the event and the address of the local family so you can visit them. Again: you choose the level of engagement you’re comfortable with, we’ll make it happen! Starting from € 1,000 (SG$ 1,500) you can bring lifelong lifesaving sanitation to one family or a school!

Example 6:
Join our gender equality journey

Indonesia’s society is a front-runner in terms of gender-equality. Equal pay for equal work is mandated by law and the government aims for a gender-equal distribution at all levels. Indonesian men, in general, listen better to a female boss than to a male one! But (particularly in rural areas) women have a high level of mutual distrust. We have found that this distrust can be turned around into collaboration by doing joint projects! Indonesian women –like all Indonesian people– love to share their experiences, and you’ll discover many shared emotions, as well as some different ones.

Pair up with local women and embark together on a conscious journey –shared via digital online means– on what it means to feel fully empowered. You could mix this with a joint project like example 2. We can get you started on this, but this could well be the best journey you’ve ever made in term of self-discovery …. and this is true for men and boys just the same!

Options: As an individual, you could buddy up with one single Indonesian woman (they are keen!), or as a group, you can design group events with group exchanges. For those with language skills, interviewing each other and writing letters to each other can be awesome! … The whole experience can be arranged for under € 1,000, so if gender-equality is your thing (as it is for Loola’s founder), you’re going to have an awesome experience, no matter what you choose.

For schools & universities

Curriculum / personal skills
(as per MOE SEM, GSC, IBO, PISA standards*):

• Character-building / leadership / Perseverance
• Planning skills / transdisciplinary thinking
• Collaborative working / communication
• Documenting evidence / resource mgt
• Network building / managing diversity
• Digital literacy / virtual collaboration
• Creative thinking / problem solving
• Decision making / sense making
• Making ethical choices
• Apply curriculum in real life
• Global mindset (awareness & engagement)
• Understanding & engaging UN SDGs, climate change, environmental impacts
• Bundle CAS + TOK through ethics; helps the writing of EE (Extended Essays)
• Contacts can be sustained as part of study units and in-depth case studies
• YEP-GO, VOCIP and CAS compliant
• I & E (Innovation & Enterprise & ESP (Eco Stewardship Program) compliant

(*) SEM = School Excellence Model; GSC = Generic Skills and Competencies; IBO = International Baccalaurate Organisation, PISA = Programme for International Student Assessment

For Companies:

CSR / GRI / CSV * + team-building
Post-COVID, team-building may be more important than ever as we need to design new ways together to keep our organisations healthy and productive. COVID has also highlighted the importance of sustainability on a global scale, so CSR/GRI/CSV, too, is set to become even more prominent.

Roll CSR and teambuilding into one event
The good news for companies is that you can roll CSR and team-building into one single event that addresses both topics at once, creating a fantastic productive event at half the cost of each!

Do good, and see for yourself
Whichever project you choose, you have the opportunity to get close and make personal friendships with the people you affect

This team-building/CSR event is build to last
As the examples and sample packages show, the e-journeys that we offer allow your staff a lasting team-building opportunity with a CSR impact that you can continue to measure and nurture long into the future –at no extra charge.

(*) CSR = Corporate Social Responsibility, GRI = Global Reporting Initiative, CSV = Creating Shared Value