Letter to Hotel Magnate

The following is a pared-down edit of a letter I sent this spring profiling a little pipe dream that needed to find its way into the right hands:




Dear [hotel magnate,]

[I have an idea for you.] … Before I tell you my idea, I beg you to view any difficulties that may be involved as challenges to put new solutions to old problems. Please don’t take the problems that tore down other peoples’ projects as an edict that no such thing will ever work. I believe strongly that there is a way if you will but find it.

OK, my idea is: Please build one of your wonderful hotels as a sanctuary for a community of refugees. What do refugees need? They need food, clothing, shelter and medical care; but they also need a way to get back on their feet in time to pursue their dreams and make their own contributions. One lady in a refugee camp said to the press, “All I can do is sit here and watch my youth rot.” I never forgot the quote, although I have long forgotten who said it and where. (Imagine how she would feel knowing that her remark helped inspire you to help someone in her situation.)

I think that you and your staff could conceivably work out a way to meet the needs of a sizeable community in a way that would actually pay back the monetary outlay and eventually sustain itself. Imagine helping a displaced population to construct their own communal or cooperative residence, replete with air-conditioned offices, home suites, classrooms, solar panels down the south side, space for crops, a wind farm atop a green roof with a swimming pool, a community cafeteria with the services of a staff nutritionist – and land title!

What would you bet that the buzz alone could defray the cost of the pilot effort? And when residents started launching their own enterprises they could eventually take over the operating expenses of the whole project, especially with the support of eager corporate sponsors and partners.

Now, I’m not suggesting that anyone approach a shell-shocked group of people and “make everyone work.” You always get a mixed bag. Some will take years to recover to the point of functionality, while others will be desperate for a way to apply their efforts to bettering their situation on the day that you first meet them.

If you do this project, I submit that you will teach society some important lessons to which it has only recently become receptive. That is why I believe that precisely which community and which individuals you decide to include in the pilot effort is maybe not as important as the idea that you start somewhere, on behalf of the world, so that we as a society can learn these timely lessons about how we can and should treat one another on this planet. Moreover, I’m certain that most displaced persons would agree…

[finis]