FOR THE HEALTH AND WELL BEING OF OUR PEOPLE AND OUR PLACE

COMMUNITY AND ENVIRONMENT

Tohu Experiences strives to develop sustainable programmes and initiatives that have positive outcomes that include all four pillars; Te Taiao, He Tangata, Tuakiri, Ohanga. While our tourism specific operations show positive outcomes for the community through products like our Marae Experience (delivering authentic cultural experiences by the people, for the people) and our International School Tours (school and sports clubs exchanges providing koha for schools and experiences for students interacting with other cultures), we recognise that we can do more good by targeting the heart of our communities, using the visitor industry businesses we own to fund and operate initiatives that are specifically about meeting the community’s needs, rather than a by-product of a visitor experience.

For this reason, all our initiatives have a focus of aligning with the communities they are based in, actively engaging support from the community and supporting legacy outcomes of general health and wellbeing outcomes.

Tohu Experiences has been a tourism leader with engraining social enterprise in to the normal practice and operations of business. We’ve been driving the normalising of doing business to achieve positive outcomes for Aotearoa New Zealand that goes beyond financial, or more recently environmentally, and includes focussing on culture and our people.

As the only organisation in Rotorua supporting the grass roots delivery of active participation in mountain biking, it is clear when you see the change of demographics riding in the Whakarewarewa Forest Park that our organisation has had an impact. Whether it be the high volume of locals attending the free days at the international bike festival, Crankworx (which we operate), or the dozens of families we have provided bikes, helmets and bike racks for, our proof is in the pudding. Since we started Mountain Bike Rotorua in 2011, we’ve seen the annual visits to the Titokorangi area of the park alone sore from 78,000 to over 600,000 today, with the Rotorua Lakes Council data suggesting that the overall forest visits per annum are now over 1,000,000.

Tohu Experiences has been able to the learnings from it’s Rotorua based operations and plan, and in some cases implement, similar operations in other areas of Aotearoa New Zealand. This includes working with the New Zealand Government to operate Crankworx events in the South Island and forming partnerships to deliver Share the Ride with Whanau in other regions.

​

Our initiatives are focussed on breaking down as many barriers as possibly including cost, distance, lack of knowledge and lack of confidence. By taking this approach, we provide access to experiences, activities, education and in the case of the Share the Ride programmes, ownership of assets, that whanau might normally not be able to enjoy. Furthermore, by being a Maori lead organisation, the intrinsic values of caring for our people and our place are organically intertwined into all of our operations.