Fondation Medine Horizons kick-started 2020 with a distribution of donations on the 30th of January, by the Group’s volunteering staff members (Medine Volunteers), under the foundation’s “GIVE” project; the purpose of this particular project is to promote the practice of a circular economy. On the event day, clothes, toys, school material, and non-perishable food were distributed to 19 deprived families residing at Longères and Chebec, two of Chebel’s neighborhoods. Over the days preceding, as a manner of bringing their personal contribution to the event, these families had invested themselves in cleaning up their gardens and adjacent waste grounds. With the added collaboration of Beau Bassin / Rose Hill Municipality, several tonnes of garbage have thereby been removed. On D-day, the Medine Volunteers team set up for that “GIVE” operation, and counting in their ranks Thierry Sauzier, Chief Executive Officer, and Céline Guillot-Sestier, Head of Group Communications and CSR, handed over to each of these Chebel families, in the name of Medine Group, a two-month stock of basic foodstuffs; school material for their children, as well as a gift of endemic plants.

Fondation Medine Horizons (FMH), supported by Medine Volunteers, kick starts 2020 within the frame of a « GIVE » project, the purpose thereof being to extend, through regular donations, a helping hand to families of the West living in precarious conditions. To invite donations, FMH calls out upstream to the generosity of the Group’s employees and to external contributors, who regularly provide new or good second-hand material. To facilitate donations, and collection of these, boxes are placed across the Group’s various departments, at the companies operating in Uniciti Office Park and in the institutions of Uniciti Education Hub.

Last 30th of January, some ten Medine Volunteers acting as the overall donators’ representatives, arrived in Chebel with multiple bags containing clothes, toys, school material and foddstuffs on board their vehicles. These were destined to nine familles living in extreme poverty in Chebel’s so-called Longères neighbourhood and to ten familles living in NHDC Chebec residences, who had been identified by Caritas Beau Bassin and l’Association de Chebec. The overall donation consisted of 400 pieces of clothing for men, women and children as well as a two-month stock of basic non-perishable food for the nineteen families, plus school material for their 26 children to facilitate the start of the school year for them.

This coming together, at the heart of Chebel, of Medine Volunteers and these families, offered the latter the opportunity to share the daily challenges they have to face every day. During this exchange, Thierry Sauzier, CEO of Medine Group put forward that :- « Through our contribution, we wish to express our support to families living in extremely difficult conditions, some of whom lack basic facilities such as a protective walls or even toilets; we hope that our compassionate action will bring them some courage in the days to come. Such Medine Group’s projects, besides their purpose of extending a helping hand to poverty-stricken communities through support to education, housing or an improved environment, are also meant to allow our staff, through Medine Volunteers, to meet the families of these communities and get a closer understanding of their living conditions by way of such meaningful sharings, thereby engaging Medine Group employees to invest themselves in contributing make the country a better place. »

Over the days preceding the event, the 19 families who had been earmarked as worthy beneficiaries – as a manner of bringing their personal contribution to the event, invested themselves in cleaning up their gardens and adjacent waste grounds. With their collaboration and that of Beau Bassin / Rose Hill Municipality, several tonnes of garbage have thereby been removed. To translate its engagement towards the protection of the environment, FMH also offered these Chebel families an overall thirty endemic plants or so, that were planted on that day in their gardens freshly restored to cleanliness, so that these plants, upon growing into trees, would offer them refreshing shade from the glare of the sun in the West. The symbolical value attached to this « planting operation » is that the whole event means, in itself, Medine Group’s will, thereby, to sow the seeds of a better future for these families of the Chebel community.