Wira and the Five Pillars of Sustainable Development

I Putu Wiraguna

I Putu Wiraguna was raised in the village of Yehembang, west Bali. Wira is a community leader, an entrepreneur and innovator who has dedicated his life to not only preserving Balinese culture and identity, but also to reshaping the way we look at tourism.

From a young age Wira has seen members of his community leave to find work in the big cities in order to make money and provide fr their families. The downside to this mass migration has been a notable population shift from rural to urban communities, which has had a negative impact on the preservation of ancestral knowledge in these rural communities.

Wira started the Five Pillar Foundation alongside his friend Alan Yu with the purpose of creating new employment opportunities in these villages and to educate the next generation of Balinese on their own culture and traditions.

The Five Pillar Foundation has since grown to operate in over 30 villages across Bali, not only preserving their culture and empowering local communities but also introducing tourists to a side of Bali they do not often get to experience.

Tell us a little bit about the Five Pillars Foundation

The five pillars are principles, and we named it the Five Pillar Foundation to highlight the principles upon which we operate; economy, environment, education, culture and community. We are in the middle. Whatever we are doing we try to incorporate the five pillars. For example, when we look at creating enterprises to generate income for the villagers, it’s not just about making money but also about empowering the community and educating them. When you build a business in rural villages without educating the people their business is not sustainable. If you build a social movement and you don’t generate income out of it, it will not be sustainable because you need money to keep it going. So if you are picking up trash in a village without generating an income the movement will not be sustainable for long. These things need to be balanced with everything else. Our work, everything we do, is based on these principles.

The educational trips and international programs that we develop are beyond tourism. It’s not just about showing the beauty of places but also about education. We teach them about disabilities, conservation, agriculture, women’s empowerment and other subjects beyond the typical tourism experiences. These things are all integrated. When we see problems, we look at all five pillars. Take poverty for example. There are so many underutilized resources because of a lack of education, and with it you get social and cultural issues because it is all related. We map the problem and look at the root of it, because poverty is in itself a symptom of a larger underlying problem which needs to be identified before I can be fixed.

Rice plantation

This is the strategy we employ to build communities. We seek to develop two kinds of communities; global and local ones. So many people don’t care about environmental or social issues, they just work on their own problems, but there are people in these communities that care about these issues. When we talk to village leaders, they are often very interested in improving the conditions of their communities, but many people remain disinterested. That is why we try to find the right people in the community. The same problem can be found in the global community.

There are so many solutions out there and so many experts, but not all of them are concerned with these grassroots movements. For us it really matters to meet and develop the right kind of people, which is why we haven’t partnered with just-for-profit enterprises. We act as intermediaries. We bridge interested parties with the program, the project and the product.

We also run many rural community empowerment programs. On the global scale, we partner with many international organizations and educational institutions to teach people traditional agricultural practices. We are trying to shift tourism in Bali in a way that is beneficial to the local community, culture, and environment. This is run by the Five Pillar Experience.

At the start we offered people many forms of skills development. We taught people how to design, take photos, make videos, use social media and so on. Every youth had their own social media. From there we began learning about the skills they really needed to flourish and be successful in the future. Sometimes their education wasn’t enough to get a normal job or work because they weren’t taught the right skills in schools. Schools teach mostly theory but when we provided them with skills they became aware that they need to continue developing them.

When we talk about sustainable tourism for example, we mean bringing people to rural areas where they can share and learn from each other. We focus on bringing international university professors who go to really rural villages to learn about existing agricultural practices such as the subak, and how we can use this knowledge. We recently brought a professor from San Diego University to a village in Tabanan to study how the village had trained owls to hunt mice to protect thousands of hectares of rice fields. They are building the ecosystem again in a way that the professor had never thought of before. This kind of indigenous knowledge is being abandoned and we are trying to preserve their knowledge and indigenous legacy. That’s why we work with nearly 30 villages across Bali.

Palm frond weaving

What inspired you to start this foundation?

I was a farmer in west Bali until I turned 18. I also fixed motorbikes. When I graduated, just like most of the young people in my village, I dreamed of going to the city to work in restaurants and the tourism industry. My dream was to learn to speak English, so I moved to Denpasar and took a course and worked in a restaurant. I was offered a job in Ubud and that is where I met Alan. My job at the time was providing programs for university summer camps. He was one of the facilitators and was working on his dissertation. I was really eager to share my culture with Alan, and took him to meet leaders around Bali. In November 2014 Alan and I went to the startup weekend in Hubud and we pitched a project based on entrepreneur solidarity.

In Bali the banjar only focuses on cultural and social issues. We were always spending money on the community but never made any income as a collective. Many people moved to the city because of a lack of job opportunity in the village. Our idea was to build collective enterprises in these villages. After that I was still working at that company and couldn’t decide whether I would resign and take a risk. My motivation was that I really wanted to go back to my village to do something, and to help people like so many of my friends who continue to struggle.

So in June 2015, Alan and I moved out of Ubud to Jembrana Regency. A village leader in my hometown donated a hectare of land to our project, and our idea was to build a collective enterprise based on trash. We wanted to explore how trash could be reused to make bricks, gasoline, roofing etc. I had researched so much and presented it to the village, but what is the point if you don’t have funding? The villagers liked the idea but because of a lack of funding, education and so on what could we do next? I didn’t know how to get funding so we backed off and looked at better ways to help the village. We began meeting with village leaders, artisans, farmers, and breeders and found that there are solutions out there in the village, so why not work with existing solutions, rather than reinvent the wheel? We partnered with so many local heroes to collect data and find solutions.

By November 2015 we set up FPF and we began expanding our network and working with many villages across west Bali. We focused on generating local impact, we focused on youth skills development because so many people were leaving their villages and as a result a lot of land was abandoned. We are trying to tackle the problem at the heart of it all. It’s not even that they aren’t making enough money, but it’s about showing them how to use the resources they have properly.

Balinese culture is rich and very welcoming, but also always evolving. How do you preserve something that is always changing?

Culture is holistic, but culture here is also a life philosophy; how you live with yourself, your family, your community and the world. We focus on low-level cultural preservation. What I mean by this is we try to preserve the essence of the culture, the identity and the knowledge. We have for example introduced young people to what our ancestors have already been doing for centuries such as making musical instruments. They can modify it and collaborate with other sounds, but from there they learn to respect the artisans. We also run programs that teach our youth about their identity because they are in Bali and should learn what this means. What is the purpose of incense? Why do we pray in temples? Why did our ancestors give us this culture, behavior and spiritual beliefs? For us preservation is about understanding and knowing better, because in Bali we also believe if you lose your link to your ancestors you lose your identity.

Our ancestors began thinking about sustainability a long time ago. How Bali itself developed, the temple’s integration into its surroundings, the subak system, they had already developed these things. Our temples and culture are very much alive, unlike places such as Angkor Watt. Right now, we are trying to convince the government to rethink how they commission temple renovations, because these temples are essentially packed with data, but when you renovate it, some of that data is wiped. Usually construction workers don’t understand and don’t care about the data contained within these temples. If you look at modern Balinese temples, they are much less elaborate than our old ones and have few carvings. Old temples however are covered in carvings that carry meaning and symbolize so much of our culture.

The world right now is very destructive. Every second it is changing. In this current situation how will Bali continue to be resilient? Bali is always adapting, but I worry about how our culture will continue to exist in the age of globalism.

Why do you work with tourism?

Bali’s strength is in tourism. Most income is generated from tourism here. We aren’t just about bringing people to see Bali, we are also focused on bringing people to understand, learn, connect, give back, and to create ideas. What is the impact when someone simply visits a place and takes a picture? Tourism isn’t only about generating revenue, it can also help to empower local communities. Tourism can preserve local cultural environments through sustainable programs.

What kind of programs does FPF run in regards to environmental campaigns?

We host environmental classes every month, and partner with existing environmental organizations in west Bali and beyond to create a movement. This class focuses on teaching young people about what their environmental impact is. Schools don’t teach these things, they won’t teach kids about things like eco-bricks, or plastics. They will only learn how to throw it away. We have this class where we bring people to the beach where they can learn about turtles and the impact of trash in the ocean. Behind it all is awareness. It’s about teaching people how they can minimize plastic consumption and such. We partner with many organizations such as Trash Hero to educate people.

Our ecotourism also contributes to cleaning up villages, because they know if their village is

dirty, people won’t want to come visit. It’s all about how you transfer this message to villagers and leaders.

These are small steps but with a major impact. It helps people understand the problem from their own perspective.

Has there been any positive government reaction to your program?

We have tried convincing the local government in west Bali to develop not only facilities, but the human resource needed; education, awareness, preservation. On the positive side they understand what we are trying to do, but the government is very bureaucratic and moves very slowly. That is why president Jokowi is trying to find a way to streamline our country’s bureaucracy. It is much better for us to work independent of the government, while still partnering with individuals within the government.

What lessons can other communities around Bali learn from your efforts?

Well we share our knowledge but we also absorb so much knowledge from local communities. We often get calls from different communities asking for advice and I believe it is all about collaboration. If you make moves only for your own benefit you won’t get as far. If you run alone you can run fast, but if you run together you can run farther. We work with as many local heroes as we can so we can connect them to each other and increase our impact. It’s about connecting with others who have the same mindset and values. Collaboration, not competition, is the key.

Have any big plans for 2019?

We are splitting the organization into two entities. Before everything operated under the Five Pillars Foundation, which included our non-profit work and our for-profit work. We are working hard to launch the Five Pillar Experience, which focuses on all the programs that fund our foundation. It will become an entirely separate entity from the non-profit segment.

Both are related. When the foundation works in the village mapping potential, and when we find a local hero and help them develop a program, the Five Pillar Experience comes in. through the Experience we generate funding to continue expanding our operation. We are also looking to expand our foundation to east Java.