Several persons from the private and public sectors as well as the general public attended a Breakfast meeting this morning at the Belize Biltmore Plaza Hotel in Belize City. The event was the Love Foundation’s first Awards Breakfast geared at presenting to its stakeholders, the activities and causes that the organization has undertaken over the last year. Deborah Sewell is the Executive Director.
DEBORAH SEWELL
“The purpose of this morning’s breakfast was to, first of all, get out to people what the Love Foundation has been doing for the past year. We have been involved in a lot of different activities and we wanted to share that with our supporters, our donors and just people who could be potential donors. So, we invited 100 people to our breakfast and we were able to share that with them.”
One of the corporate sponsors of this morning’s event was the Santander Group. According to Beverly Burke, the Public Relations officer for Santander Group, their company seeks to give back to the community and this event was an ideal opportunity to do so.
BEVERLY BURKE
“When we started establishing the Santander Group in Belize and we looked at what we really wanted our Mission and Vision to be, we looked at four very distinct areas. Of course the business of Santander is sugar and energy but we felt it extremely necessary to incorporate over all development as well as community so when Deborah reached out to Santander saying, “we’re looking for a corporate partner in the Love Foundation” Santander jumped on that immediately because the vision is so similar to what we have. We looked at developing the communities and one such effort of ours is by ensuring that we bring education to the community in which the project is actually located so we’ve been working tirelessly on ensuring that we start building the communities in which we operate and as I said, it rightfully fitted with what Love Foundation is all about.”
As part of this morning’s entertainment, the Love Foundation had gotten the choir from The Office Gurus Call Centre to perform. The Office Gurus Call Centre was established in 2012 and is located on Joseph Andrews Drive in San Ignacio Town, Cayo District and currently has an estimated one hundred and thirty five persons employed. We spoke to the 5-member choir on their purpose.
THE OFFICE GURUS
“We are located in San Ignacio and we are a call centre, so we are actually a choir from the Office Gurus. We actually sing and we do songs and today, we were excited to celebrate with them. We did two songs, like karaoke songs and we are going to do original songs in the future.”
RENEE TRUJILLO
“It’s a bit peculiar to actually see a choir coming out of a call center so talk to me in terms of how that even came about.”
THE OFFICE GURUS
“Well, everybody has their own talents and actually Samantha Sharp is our HR manager and she came up with it and we actually have three branches, one here in Belize, El Salvador and one in the US; they also have their own choirs so why not have one in Belize as well? So, we created our own choir. We have guitarists, we have two singers and a pianist. We work at the call center but we also do fun activities for the community, we do it like a community service kind of thing. They do pay us an overtime sort of thing but it’s not like we are doing it for the money but it’s just for giving back to the community and that is a program that we have at the Office Gurus where we give back to the community.”
The Love Foundation Awards Breakfast is the first of what is planned to be an annual event. The organisation has as its Board members, Doctor Rene Villanueva Sr., Rene Villanueva Jr., Steffi Lupp, Ellison Flowers, Anna Hoard, Kenny Vanjani, Francis Woods and Bishop Phillip Wright
Source article: http://lovefm.com/love-foundation-holds-awards-breakfast-event/
Love Foundation 