Monkey Jungle and Zip Line Adventures is a new concept in self-sustaining, charitable giving.
- It is the first business in the world in which all its profits, all, are assigned to help the poor. This is business philanthropy at its highest—a binding together of business and charity to become one.
How is this accomplished?
Firstly, there is Monkey Jungle the business, an eco-adventure tourist attraction in Sosua on the north coast of the Dominican Republic, eight miles (13 kilometers) back in the country, and not far from Cabarete.
Adventure
- Guests play and interact with 13 squirrel monkeys, plus 7 new babies, while feeding them organic fruit in a two-acre jungle grotto on a 250 acre organic farm from whence comes their food. This is particularly a great adventure for children to get closer to nature while having a lot of fun.
- Seven zip lines, each with its own dramatic view, criss-cross the ranch’s hills and valleys.
The zip lines are certified by the Association for Challenge Course Technology (ACCT) in the United States and are the only ones in the Dominican Republic with double cables for extra safety, thus exceeding most everybody’s standards of safety. This falls in line with the old maxim: a craftsman is man who does a job better than most people think worth doing.
- Guests can also dine on a lunch of hamburgers made with Monkey Jungle’s own, grass-fed, organic beef. (If you go to Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s you buy organic or grass fed, not both. And when it is “grass fed,” the last six weeks the animal is in a lot being fed corn. Not so with the MJ ranch—it is grass fed up to the moment it is slaughtered. And tender. The whole thing is tender because of the way it is slaughtered.)
All the water used on the premises is from a tested well that is toxin-free of both human pollution and the run off of toxic, synthetic agricultural chemicals. It is pure, like nature intended.
Treating the Staff Right
All the workers get an above-average salary. When most of them started work, they had no motor cycles, the common form of transportation for the poor. Now most of them do. They all get a free hot lunch daily.
The seven-member, zip-line guide team get free housing: private bed rooms, a common kitchen, a living room with flat screen TV, two showers and two toilets. All have a dramatic view of the rain forest, rolling hills and the fields of the organic farm.
It is an understatement to say the staff gets treated well.
Clinic for the Poor
- The second half of the partnership is the on-site, absolutely free clinic for the poor consisting of medical, dental and eye services. All the profits of the business go to the organizing charity, which is the Haitian and Dominican Assistance Corporation, a 501c3 non-profit corporation
The clinic staff consists of a paid Dominican doctor, eye examiner, dentist and manager. Volunteers include a second dentist, two registered nurses and eight assistants who tend to 150 poor every Saturday. When appropriate, patients get free medicine from the on-premise pharmacy run by a volunteer, retired pharmacist.
All this volunteering leaves more money to purchase the US$250,000 inventory of medicines that treat diabetes, high cholesterol, heart conditions, kidney ailments and a host of physical ailments that plague humanity.
- The founders and corporate officers of this new, combined business and philanthropic enterprise are Candy and Chuck Ritzen. They take no salary or money from the business or clinics for personal needs. None.
It is not a give-back situation: Because it takes nothing.
D. O. Christian Rieger has traveled half way around the world, from Maui, to Morocco to Mauritius and about 300 places in between. From 1964 to 1973 he wrote articles about futures markets, gold and international trade for Investment Dealers’ Digest. For more information, photos and videos, visit www.monkeyjungledr.com and www.youtube.com/user/MonkeyJungleDR?feature=mhee.