Turner Volunteers Creating A Future For Rural Education

Dailycsr.com – 21 August 2015 – The CSR head of EMEA, Nick Hart says that good schooling can provide better life to the next generation. Therefore, through a total number of “six volunteer projects” coordinated by Hart, the Turner’s employee volunteers have lent their hands at building schools in “Mali, Rwanda, Malawi, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Mozambique” since the year of 2009.
 
Talking about Turner Broadcasting, one has to note that:
“A well-known philanthropist, media mogul Ted Turner set up Turner Broadcasting (now part of Time Warner) back in the 1970s and is the broadcaster behind pioneering 24 hours news channel CNN, kids’ channels Cartoon Network and Boomerang as well as Turner Classic Movies (TCM), among others”.
 
Being the producer of entertainment channels for kids, Hart thought of working to help children, whereby “developing nations” thorough education seemed a right choice. The first school building plan was executed at Mali. At first, he had to get volunteers through adequate advertisements, whereby came the problem of people management as he had to deal with eighty people who were opting for “just 20 places”. In fact, the working environments are often hard as volunteers had to work at times under “45 degrees Celsius”.
 
Secondly, the project also dealt with adequate fund raising which will not only help in building the school and its much needed tools and equipments but also ensure a proper training session to the teachers. Each volunteer took upon the responsibility of raising “a minimum of £1000” besides providing their own travel costs. However, the rest of the fund was donated by the company which also granted the volunteers a “five days volunteer leave”.
 
Hart also informed that all the building projects coordinated by him so far involved professional builders and architects, the volunteers only carried out other works like “lifting bricks and mixing concrete”. Collaborating with ActionAid, volunteers from Turner Broadcasting has just built a library at Mozambique, whereby the books and necessary furnishing were accomplished from the fund that was raised for this very purpose. Moreover, Turner decided to collaborate with ActionAid as it has:
“...(a) long term presence in the communities in which they work means that they are trusted and have an in-depth knowledge of local culture and the context to provide them with the appropriate support”.
 
Additionally, these social ventures have proven to be an occasion for cultural exchange even though there exists a huge disparity in rural and city lifestyles; the volunteers were also exposed to rural local lifestyle and live with the inhabitants closely and Hart believes:
“...the payback for the volunteers is enormous. “The generosity of the people we’ve met is incredible. To see how people in other cultures live, to witness the lives of people who have never left their villages and have very different traditions, is eye-opening and very inspiring.”
 
In fact, Hart explains that these initiates have been doubly beneficial as:
“CNN regularly reports on developing countries and our staff create entertainment services for Africa so these experiences give our employees real insight into everyday life in countries that we serve.”