Founded by a family of divers, the foundation is based in the Peninsula of Balantak, Luwuk, Central Sulawesi. Our mission is to preserve and safeguard the marine environement of this area as well as to promote sustainable developement of the communities.
Actively involving our guests, the villagers and the local government, we focus on providing a structure to overcome the challenges of marine conservation by combining environmental, social and educational elements. As a community based conservation, we constantly encourage the local community to identify the natural and social resources that they have in order to respect and preserve it.
Suryani being native from Luwuk, we started with a first (small) boat, covering the areas of Banggai and Togian islands. Exploring the coast between those 2 archipelagos we discovered the fabulous underwater world of the Balantak Peninsula, also know as Pulau Dua area.
We regularly brought our guests to dive this area. However, during those years we could see some degradation happening on the reefs, due to fish bombing and overfishing.
Our efforts to preserve the area were in vain as we didn’t have a base in the area. Later on we developped the activity of Wallacea Dive Cruise with a bigger boat, and went to some other areas that were more promising in terms of marketing: Raja Ampat, Komodo, etc.
Then we started to actively fight for the wealth of the reefs. With our permanent presence and thanks to the implication of the local governement, by regular patroling with the authorities, we managed to stop the fish bombing and other destructive fishing practises.
Later on we created the NGO Tompotika Foundation, to have a distinct entity dedicated to the conservation, separated from the commercial resort activity.
By today, we are very happy to say that fish bombing is not happening anymore, even if the threats still could be back any time. Due to the development of offshore fishing activities the pressure on the reefs is now much smaller.
The founders are Suryani Mile and Jerome Doucet, and the Foundation is managed a team based in Kampangar, at Pulau Dua.