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Kim Whitaker: From hospitality entrepreneur to making beds for Covid

Kim Whitaker: From hospitality entrepreneur to making beds for Covid
Hospitality business owner, speaker and business coach Kim Whitaker shows off the interesting designs and space inside one of the rooms at her Once in Cape Town hotel in Kloof Street. (Photo: David Harrison)

The pandemic has mostly been about bad news – deaths, unemployment, lockdown and so on. However, as some people saw their income dry up, they became creative and found new ways to survive. This week we tell a few of these stories. The fourth in the series is about a hotel owner who made sure health workers had a place to lay their heads.

Hospitality entrepreneur Kim Whitaker contracted Covid-19 in March. Three months later, she lost her grandmother Gisela Teßmann to the virus. Whitaker sat at her 89-year-old grandmother’s bedside at a Cape Town old age home in the days before she died.

“My grandmother was in the frail care section of her old age home,” says Whitaker. “And ja, they called us on the Friday morning saying two people had died there of Covid that week, and that she wasn’t doing well. She had really deteriorated. So they allowed me to sit next to her for her last two days. It was because I’d had a Covid-positive test, so they assumed that I had all the antibodies.

“My grandmother and I, we were very close. And it’s funny, afterwards I thought, wow, maybe this is the reason I got Covid. I felt very grateful that I could sit next to her when she passed away. Very, very grateful.” 

Over Zoom, Whitaker is composed; her voice shaking slightly while speaking of her late grandmother. Even though her own coronavirus symptoms were mild, she still gets short of breath. 

While the Covid-19 pandemic affected Whitaker very personally, it also sparked her latest business venture. In March, while self-isolating with her husband and children, aged four and seven, on a farm in Tulbagh, the 36-year-old hotel owner was mopping the kitchen when inspiration hit. 

Ubuntu Beds founder Kim Whitaker. (Photo by David Harrison)

“I was on a seven-hour mopping spree in my kitchen, rocking out to Alanis Morissette,” she recalls. “I was kind of thinking about hard lockdown. How hectic it was going to be for the tourism industry. I thought of all my colleagues. Whether in Mpumalanga, Joburg, Durban, Cape Town or Umtata, everyone had empty beds. Like, everyone was freaking out.

“And, as I was doing my cleaning, I thought how equally hectic it would be for the medical profession, all the nurses and the doctors risking their lives. I had listened to a Zoom call with a doctor from Italy a few weeks earlier. He said he wished he’d organised with hotels that nurses and doctors could stay there during lockdown. And I thought of healthcare workers in South Africa. Many nurses live far away from hospitals, they have to take public transport. And would healthcare workers want to go home, potentially putting their families at risk?”

And so, Ubuntu Beds was born: “I thought to myself, well let’s put up a website. And have one form where we fill in the details of healthcare workers. And another form for those who can provide accommodation, and then we just match them.” 

Founder Kim Whitaker points to the Ubuntu Beds website header. (Photo: David Harrison)

Essentially, the digital accommodation platform matches healthcare workers with hotels, guest houses, and rental properties, located near their places of work, such as hospitals or clinics. Donations then pay for them to be safely accommodated, free. 

Help poured in after Whitaker first shared her idea on Cape Talk in March, with major donations by FirstRand Bank and Dutch reservations agency booking.com, kickstarting the project. Today, the website has 1,179 signed-up hospitality providers, 886 signed-up healthcare workers, with a total of 16,496 bed nights arranged. 

At the height of the pandemic, 37 volunteers worked on the project.

“We had everything from web developers to lawyers and accountants,” says Whitaker. “In that moment of need, there was just such an intention to help. People loved what we were doing and came forward in droves. Most of them I wouldn’t recognise from the side. Like, I only know them from making Zoom calls.”

Whitaker’s own Braamfontein youth hotel “Once in Joburg” was forced shut in mid-June. Its sibling “Once in Cape Town” in Kloof Street is still open. In a post-Covid world, she hopes to continue the Ubuntu Beds model for humanitarian purposes. For example, for families of patients who cannot afford accommodation near hospitals. 

“Let’s say the Red Cross Children’s Hospital,” says Whitaker. “Sometimes kids from far away will qualify for eye surgery. So they’ll come down all the way from, let’s say Botswana. But then the parents may have no money to stay in Cape Town, and they end up sleeping in a night shelter while waiting for their child.”

She points out how a similar digital platform in Lebanon called “Baytna Baytak” (“Our home is your home,” in Arabic) which was originally founded to house Covid-19 medical staff, was used to house thousands of displaced people after the Beirut blast on 4 August.

Whitaker, who holds qualifications from Stellenbosch University, Red & Yellow Creative School of Business and the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business, says Covid-19 taught her to think of uncertainty as exciting.

“This year has been very real,” she says. “Like, I’ve had a lot of honest conversations. I wouldn’t have wanted it any differently, though. I realised that uncertainty is something very exciting, almost like a gift or an opportunity. Like when we wake up and we’re like: ‘I don’t know what tomorrow is going to hold.’ This is actually an opportunity, in disguise.” DM/MC

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"Information pertaining to Covid-19, vaccines, how to control the spread of the virus and potential treatments is ever-changing. Under the South African Disaster Management Act Regulation 11(5)(c) it is prohibited to publish information through any medium with the intention to deceive people on government measures to address COVID-19. We are therefore disabling the comment section on this article in order to protect both the commenting member and ourselves from potential liability. Should you have additional information that you think we should know, please email [email protected]"

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