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Coffee Shack Gives Back

The owners of Coffee Shack in Coffee Bay have always held firm the belief that investing in the community in a sustainable, meaningful manner, makes their wonderful part of the world a better, healthier environment for everyone including their guests and other visitors to the area.

With the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, the team from the Coffee Shack anticipated the dramatic impact of a national lockdown on the lives of the local community, many of whom are suppliers of various tourism products and services. They sprung to action not only to distribute the essential messages and sanitising supplies but to ensure that no income does not mean no food on the table!

Here is their story:

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit and a lockdown was enforced, Coffee Shack decided to help our community. We started by visiting our local traditional authorities to make sure the Covid-19 message was getting out…. What is it? How COVID19 spreads and what you can do to protect yourself, your family, and the community..… Wash your hands, stay at home, and social distance. We also did home visits to over 180 of the poorest families in the area to distribute information leaflets and hand soap and to spread the stay safe message.

However, the main initiative was to start a fundraiser so that we could support all informal tourism ‘suppliers’ – those informal businesses and individuals dependent on tourism, who could not access formal government support, in the Coffee Bay and Hole in the Wall area. The aim was to make sure that everyone who had been dependent on an income from tourism (crafters, fisherman, tourist guides, home-stays) received a food parcel every 6 to 7 weeks. Through a crowd-funding initiative aimed at our previous guests and supporters, Coffee Shack Backpackers and Sustainable Coffee Bay NPO have managed to raise over R145k – the goal is R210k. The support and generosity of our guests and friends has been overwhelming.

To date more than 5 tonnes of food parcels, with soap and facemasks have been distributed to 100 families in the Coffee Bay and Hole in the Wall area, impacting over 520 people. We have raised almost enough funds to distribute the second round of parcels in early July. The campaign https://www.backabuddy.co.za/champion/project/coffee-bay is still active, and we hope to be able to raise enough to do a third drop off of parcels in August, as the likelihood of tourism being back to normal in August and September is exceedingly low, and consequently, these families will still have no income.