BANGKOK, 19 August 2020: More than 50 Agoda employees, including CEO John Brown, worked alongside the local Chiang Mai community to kick start the planting of 6,000 trees as part of its Corporate Social Responsibility sustainability initiative in collaboration with World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Thailand.
John Brown (CEO, Agoda) and Rattapat Srichanklad (FLR349 Fund Secretary) with team members at the planting ceremony.
In its first WWF venture, Agoda pledged to plant trees on behalf of its 2019 Gold Circle Award-winning hotel partners in Thailand and China at the weekend. Along with some of its hotel partners, Agoda joined local community volunteers, students from the School of Forest Industry Organization No 13.
The teams prepared the fertilizers and planted seedlings, as part of the WWF effort which also encourages 10 farming families who manage the land to shift from mono-agriculture farming to a “Three Forests Four Benefits” management to restore the environment and stop topsoil destruction.
“We are proud to be part of this project and to work with WWF, which directly benefits smallholder farmers, and on a larger scale, the wider rural community and ecosystem. At Agoda, we passionately committed to giving back to the community in a meaningful way, whether that’s helping small business owners throughout Thailand to connect with, and benefit from the economic and social benefits of tourism in a sustainable way or supporting local community initiatives such as this one, which we can provide both a financial contribution but also ensure we volunteer our time and efforts too.
The project is part of WWF’s Forest Landscape Restoration Fund 349 (FLR 349), that has a mission to restore the ecosystem, create sustainable food system to help farmers to escape the debt cycle arisen from monoculture and at the same time conserve the soil, watersheds, and natural forest to prevent flooding.
