Winepress - March 2024

Village to Village

Paying it forward for seasonal workforce

SOPHIE PREECE

CLOUDY BAY Vineyards is working with a Marlboroughbased charitable trust to help seasonal workers forge sustainable businesses when they return to their home communities.

The partnership will enable the Village to Village Charitable Trust to offer interest-free loans to Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) scheme workers wanting to develop an agriculture-based business in their home country. “What we want to do is build financial resilience for RSE workers and finance them into their own micro enterprise when they go home,” says start-up expert and board chair Tracy Atkin, who established the trust with Sarah Bates in 2021 as a way of improving social, economic and health outcomes for the families and villages of RSE workers.

Tracy says many RSE workers were stranded in New Zealand for an extended period during Covid-19, which highlighted the sacrifices being made by individuals, and the families and communities they’d left behind. The initiative began with sponsorship from the wine industry and Zespri for clean energy cook stoves to replace the open fires impacting eye and respiratory health in the Pacific Islands, as well as funds for community-driven initiatives. “We called it Village to Village because we want that connection with each RSE worker and their unique circumstances ,” Tracy says. “Our point of difference is that employers sponsor their RSE workers and get to know their community needs, rather than a donations-based approach”

Those technology-based initiatives will continue with wider industry sponsorship, but Cloudy Bay’s involvement as a foundation sponsor has allowed the trust to launch the new entrepreneurship programme, which begins with financial literacy and small business courses through Vakameasina, a free education and development programme for RSE Workers in Aotearoa. RSE workers who graduate from those programmes with a good business plan will be able to apply for an interest free loan, then tap into the knowledge of mentors supplied by the trust in their home nation. The loan is to be paid back within three years, which Tracy calls “paying it forward”, describing a snowball effect where the loans pick up momentum over time by being redirected into new initiatives. It’s “entrepreneurship for good”, she adds, enjoying the intersection between business and community outcomes. There are plenty of others excited by the idea, and the trust has formed partnerships with several organisations, including the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Trade, and its offshoots Pacific Trade Invest and Vakameasina, as well as ANZ Bank and Cloudy Bay, and BDO in Marlborough, which has provided free accounting services.

Cloudy Bay Technical Director Jim White says the company was looking for ways of engaging with their community, and considered several initiatives based around the valleys that grow their wines. But as soon as the idea of supporting the RSE community was raised, everyone was on board. The seasonal labour scheme is a “fundamental” part of the New Zealand wine industry, but there’s little “meaningful” engagement with the workers making major sacrifices to be here, leaving families and communities behind, Jim says. The company wanted to do more in return than just “pay a wage”, and homed in on the idea of supporting workers to establish businesses related to farming, aligned with Cloudy Bay’s The Good Pick Fund, a corporate social responsibility programme focussed on developing financial resilience through agriculture. “Village to Village was like a glove that fitted us perfectly,” says Jim, who is now a trustee. “We have a Village to Village ambition to grow the scheme much more broadly within New Zealand, and eventually potentially into Australia as well, with the primary mission of improving lives in the Pacific via their participation in the RSE scheme.” From a Cloudy Bay perspective, “phase two” is to grow the relationship between the company and the RSE workers that are so vital to its success. “To engage with the RSE workers, better understand their world, and share that with the community of Marlborough.”