Way back in April, we had some trials and tribulations with our volunteer project arranged by Frontier at Mokolodi Nature Reserve.
Nothing wrong with Mokolodi at all, merely an issue with Frontier who misrepresented the Botswana volunteer placement to us – which ultimately led us to engaging with them and the placement in Botswana.
We left the project at the end of April and received no follow-up from Frontier, perhaps understandable given the extent of their wrongdoing. However, they didn’t even provide us with a formal apology for misrepresenting the project, despite admitting liability in a very legalese email to us.
So, we carefully considered what the best next steps would be for us. The options seemed to be a small claims court claim or some sort of exposure in the UK press. After much debate, we concluded it was less about the money and more about ensuring other volunteers were aware of the issues we experienced.
After some effort from ourselves and a good friend in the UK PR industry, the UK journalist Mark Foxwell picked up and ran with the story for the Mail on Sunday. After some detailed investigation, it seemed that our predicament became a catalyst for a far larger story, exposing some serious financial irregularities between two ‘Frontier’ companies, owned by the same two directors.
The story “Not-for-profit gap year firm Frontier shares its fees…and its directors” was published online last night (Saturday 8th August) and will hopefully be in the Mail on Sunday today.
Needless to say, Caroline and I are satisfied with the result, and hope that future volunteers read the article and others published out there, before deciding who to hand their hard earned cash to before heading away on a volunteer project.
