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"The place to be Local Alike is using tourism to boost the profiles of struggling communities 15 Jun 2016 at 04:00 1,021 viewed0 comments NEWSPAPER SECTION: LIFE | WRITER: KANIN SRIMANEEKULROJ Somsak Boonkam observing a forest hiking trail in Chiang Rai. Photos: Sayan Chuenudomsavad With their focus on introducing sustainable tourism practices to local rural communities in order to improve quality of life, local-tourism website Local Alike has recently been chosen to represent Thailand in Chivas' The Venture campaign, a competition among the world's social-enterprise start-ups, with the winner receiving a US$1 million prize. Now in its second year, The Venture's final round of judging will occur sometime next month. "We actually competed in the Thailand preliminaries last year, though we didn't make the cut," said Local Alike's founder and CEO Somsak Boonkam. "The judges last year were concerned about our ability to scale up, as we had only 18 partner communities offered. This year, we've grown to include over 50 member communities, all of whom were working very closely with to introduce and develop sustainable tourism in their communities. It goes together nicely with the campaign's slogan of 'Win the right way', as we are helping these local communities grow by their own strength instead of just giving them money." Unlike many other tourism-related businesses, Local Alike puts a significant emphasis on collaborating with locals in improving their community's quality of living. Furthermore, they also work closely with these communities to develop unique tourism experiences based on the community's cultural heritage. Once they're ready, Local Alike puts the community on their online platform, where tourists can go and enjoy the activities and facilities prepared and overseen by the locals themselves. Somsak Boonkam meeting with representatives from a partner community. To demonstrate his point, Somsak recalled his experiences working with the Baan Suan Pa com

"When the American fast-food giant first contacted him in 1994 Amit's first challenge was close to home, convincing his vegetarian family to invest in the business. "From my family's point of view we thought through this carefully," he tells the BBC. "What convinced us was that McDonald's was willing to localise. They promised that there would be no beef or pork on the menu. "Nearly half of Indians are vegetarian so choosing a vegetarian to run their outlets here makes sense.""

"THEY live in stilted shacks built on a mud flat above piles of oyster shells, broken glass and rubbish, their nomadic days on the seas of South-east Asia gone forever. Liya Pramongkit, an elder and midwife of Thailand's largest group of Moken-speaking sea gypsies, saw her people on the small island of Koh Lao dying at the rate of one a week, many of them starving mothers and babies. "We have lost our traditional way of life as our children no longer hear the stories that have been handed down by our ancestors," Liya says, her deeply lined face showing the hardship the Moken have suffered since they were forced to leave their seafaring lives, where the only things that mattered were the tides, the fish, the storms, the moon and the sea spirits. "Before, when we lived and died on the sea, life was much better," she says. Advertisement More than three decades working in Bangkok's slums did not prepare Catholic priest Joe Maier for what he saw on Koh Lao when he made his first 30-minute boat ride here from the Thai fishing port of Ranong, in south-west Thailand, four years ago. "The people were literally starving to death, trapped between the modern world and the Moken world," Father Maier says. "I have never seen people as poor. "The women did not have milk in their breasts to feed their babies and everyone had [intestinal] worms ... there were no traditional values ... it was a matter of basic survival." For centuries, home for the Moken were hand-built boats called kabang which they plied through the Mergui Archipelago, where 800 islands are scattered along 400 kilometres of the coasts of Burma and Thailand, in the Andaman Sea. They lived on fish, molluscs, sandworms and oysters, accumulating little and living on land only during the monsoons. But massively depleted fishing stocks, the declaration of marine reserves and crackdowns on itinerant fishers in Burma forced them off their boats into an uncertain future where they are struggling to survive in a Th