Green philosophy

Helping Local Communities

• Economic benefits
• Helping hand for local crafts
• Reviving disappearing traditions
• Helping Schools

The hotel does not deprive the communities of basic resources at all, but has very actively provided basic resources, we have invested our own funds to provided access to electricity over 750 families, access to safe drinking water to over 600 families and built 6.5 km of road access to the village for common public use. This has created tremendous impact in boosting basic services and economic activity in the village. The conservation and recycling processes of the hotel are also designed to assist the social and economic growth of the villagers who live close to the hotel.

Economic benefits

Hotel provides career opportunities to more than 220 employees from local communities on full time permanent basis. We have deviated from the practice of recruiting skilled staff from the cities and make special efforts to train and recruit unemployed youth from the surrounding villages. The Heritance Kandalama empowers the people around the resort, in Kandalama and Dambulla by sourcing and procuring a range of services and products for the resort. We give right of first preference to communities around us, when sourcing materials and services.

The hotel together with the village community has developed tourist walking trail to Puranagama (Ancient Village).

Helping hand for local crafts

Substantial numbers of local craftsmen/women are provided a market place to sell their crafts. Other villagers directly benefits from tourists village tours conducted. We promote local talent by inviting traditional artists from the local communities for cultural shows and events at the hotel. The artists are thus encouraged to develop and promote traditional Sri Lankan art forms while earning a livelihood.

Reviving disappearing traditions

Kalundewa, in the Dambulla District is home to the indigenous art form “Sokari”. However, due to modernization and changes in lifestyles, Sokari was non-existent. In a bid to revive this dying art, Heritance Kandalama undertook an initiative to popularize it and invited the few “inland” Sokari artists remaining in Kalundewa to perform at the resort. Our help given to popularize local dance form has generated interest from the younger generations.

Helping Schools

For the purpose of enhancing awareness and obtaining total community commitment we decided that the best way to start is from the schools and we formed a network of 39 school ( in Dambulla Educational Division) . We conducted seminars for teachers and students , initiated a number of small environmental projects with school children such as tree planting, bird watching and reporting instances of injuries to wildlife (injured animals are treated by the hotel and released to the wild) , preventing soil erosion and also street clean ups. One of the special areas of awareness was on turning waste in to resources. A large number of Schools were gifted with class rooms, books, desks, chairs and other eqipments. These schools benefit every year from our CSR activities.