Cultural Social Enterprise
The Living Rainforest - a blossoming social enterprise
The Living Rainforest ......
- An environmental tourist attraction and educational social enterprise.
- Adapting over time to find a financial model that works.
- Demonstrating sustainability to school children, visitors and conference delegates.
The Living Rainforest is an environmental and educational visitor centre, with a thriving shop and café as well as school workshops, conferences and ticket sales contributing to their income. It’s taken a number of years for The Living Rainforest to evolve from its philanthropic beginnings. But it has survived tricky financial times and found a way of working that means it is sustainable attraction.
The Living Rainforest stands on the site of what was for many decades a leading orchid nursery in Europe. In 1991 a conversion began, led by the shoe-magnate and philanthropist Keith Bromley in partnership with horticulturist Barrie Findon. And in 1993, a new rainforest visitor centre opened to the public, Wyld Court Rainforest, featuring plants and animals from the world’s threatened rainforests.
By 1996, the visitor centre was relatively well-established and Mr Bromley gave the project to the World Land Trust, a small UK-based conservation charity with many projects overseas. In the four years that followed, however, many difficulties were encountered and financial success proved elusive. The venture was eventually passed on to Karl Hansen, the centre’s senior executive officer since early 1999, with the backing of Mr Bromley.
In 2000, Karl Hansen established The Living Rainforest as an educational charity in its own 
right, with a number of key Directors staying on as Trustees including the Chairman, Professor Gren Lucas OBE, and Margot Walker, FLS. Since the handover, the project has shown strong and steady growth. In addition to improvements in the ecological display of interacting plants and animals, new emphasis has been placed on sustainability and the inter-connections between rainforests and humanity.
The shop and café at The Living Rainforest stock a wide variety of sustainable goods, including local, fair-trade and organic items. Rupert West, Operations Manager explains: “Our trading arm has retained the Wyld Court name, for ease of in-house accounting. There has been 100 per cent growth in shop and café sales over the last two years, which coincides with our strengthening message on environmental responsibility and sustainable living”. All surpluses are invested back into Wyld Court or The Living Rainforest charity.
They see themselves as an educational visitor centre, focussing on environmental and sustainability issues, with almost 20,000 of their 70,000 annual visitors coming from schools. They also host conferences on related topics for the more specialist audience, such as sustainable food and sustainable greenhouse technology.
Although they have no local government or public sector links, state schools do purchase educational visits to The Living Rainforest, along with a variety of other schools.
The Living Rainforest believes that people are often motivated to visit because of its charitable status, conservation support and cultural links. Schools in particular are able to make use of their educational expertise and facilities to support not only the more traditional curriculum subjects of biology and geography but also newer topics such as citizenship, which the pupils can see in action.
www.livingrainforest.org
All images on this page are courtesy of the Living Rainforest
copyright © 2008 Cultural Social Enterprise