Giving Back

The María de la Esperanza Mission, located in the San Marcos Sierras region of Córdoba, Argentina, is a non-profit organization with a long history of charitable work in remote and vulnerable areas. 

It includes seven Community Centers where the tireless Sister Theresa and volunteer staff provide a daily meal to as many as 950 underprivileged local children. We support the Foundation by providing food, electricity, gas, building supplies, and school materials to each community center.

David Denies has been part of the school support program since the beginning, providing school supplies and other essential materials. A teacher gives personalized instruction to the children and they accompany children through the entire learning process.

In 2002, a new initiative of Sister Theresa gave birth to a Mobile Clinic operated by a team of volunteer health professionals called “Doctors of La Esperanza”. The mobile clinic was created to provide free monthly health-care services to uninsured people living in the most remote areas of northern Córdoba and to educate them on disease prevention.

David Denies joined the project with an initial investment in technological equipment and with ongoing funding for travel expenses, including fuel, maintenance, and food for doctors and patients.

David Denies has designed an international volunteer program in order to support the Esperanza Foundation. Volunteers learn about the Foundation and its important programs while participating in the day-to-day activities.

The experience includes a stay at one of our renowned hunting lodges, a stay in a hotel near the Foundation during volunteer time, and/or the possibility of staying at the Foundation’s headquarters.

To know more about the program write us an email: gisela@daviddenies.com

Groups of volunteers meet once monthly in order to visit one of several community centers run by the Mission Esperanza Foundation. Here, volunteers lead activities designed to teach and empower the children who frequent the centers. In particular, Solidarity Day missions can range from organized sports activities to lesson plans that include talks on recycling, or the importance of good nutrition. 

We also encourage hands-on group tasks such as planting trees or picking fruit in local orchards. The goal, ultimately, is to make a difference through meaningful interactions. In addition, volunteers help sort through and deliver donations such as children’s clothes, sneakers, books, and toys.

We also encourage our guests to contribute with donations that go toward building additional safe havens, where children are fed, receive after school classes, and take part in recreational activities.

With donations from visitors such as you, we have contributed large appliances and have built seven Community Centers to teach parents crafts and provide a safe haven for the kids to have their daily meal. If you’d like to visit, please tell your host. Help us give back by contributing with us. Together we can do so much more.

For more information visit: www.misionesperanza.org.ar

David Denies Bird Hunting’s staff collaborates closely with the foundation projects in many different ways. During our hunting days, bird boys take special care of a portion of the dove meat. It is carefully cleaned and separated into bags for freezing. This meat is then cooked at the community centers by local volunteers.

Dove meat is served at the community centers for lunch and it is also offered to the clients at our lodges.

We have recently entered into a partnership with a local recycling facility and started recycling both the brass and plastic components of the shotgun shells we shoot on our dove hunts. This is not an insignificant volume of empty hulls, as each week we generate thousands and thousands of empty shells that we collect from the field after each of our dove shoots. It turns out that the plastic used in shotgun shell manufacturing is very strong and well-suited to recycling, so this material is easily melted and transformed into little pellets, that are later used in all sorts of manufacturing. The metal components, on the other hand, are melted and go into the typical metal recycling stream.

We hope to be able to provide additional details very soon, and it would be our goal to complete the circle by turning the plastic into something useful that would help us continue our charitable works in the region. We would also like to invite other shooting operators to join us in making the recycling of empty shells a daily habit.

Together we can keep the fields cleaner, help others, and build a more sustainable business model- while still providing some of the greatest shooting imaginable!