Siladen Island has a small yet very tight-knit community of just a few hundred people — and of course, a number of those are children.

Even before we started the planning phase of Siladen Resort & Spa, we have been given full support by this fantastic community, and now almost twenty years later, that support remains as strong as ever. As a thank you, we try to do whatever we can to help further develop the community, and hopefully we can continue to grow and thrive together.

One of our longest term projects within the local community is working with the Siladen school to help provide some of the essential learning materials the children need to get the most out of their time at school.

The new school year has just began on Siladen, and this year there are a total of 27 children registered with the school — with classes ranging from 1st to 6th grade. As always with the new school year, we distributed various school materials to all the kids starting school. This year, we handed every schoolchild a backpack filled with pens, pencils, notepads, and colouring materials, as well as tooth brushes, tooth paste, and socks. Everyone was very excited to receive their backpacks full of goodies, which is always nice to see.

We also gave some materials to the school that they can hand to the children when in class — with books obviously being the most important and making up the bulk of the donation. Other things included specialist stationary, coloured paper, and colouring materials.

Guests frequently ask us how they can help the community, and we often receive donations of stationary and books to hand out to the school children. Most of the materials we gave to the children were actually donated by guests, and what was still missing was bought by Siladen.

Although every donation — no matter what it is — helps to develop the community, the thing that helps the most is money contributions. The correct workbooks that the children need can only be bought here in Indonesia, and they are quite expensive. We also prefer to standardise the materials we give to the children, so they will not bicker over who has the cooler backpack or nicer colour crayons.

Furthermore, we like to use the donation money for things other than donating school materials. Recently we spent a large portion of donation money for the Siladen choirs (both the children choir and the ladies choir), who needed funding to enter competitions around North Sulawesi. And we are currently gathering the funds to completely renovate the school, as as you can probably imagine, getting building materials to Siladen is very expensive and time consuming. Any left over money from the school renovation will then be used to continue our vaccination and neutering project for the cats and dogs of Siladen.

If you would like to learn more about our other social commitment projects, or how you can get involved, please visit the social responsibility segment of the website.