Thanks to Kaap Agri and its suppliers, children in the care of the Goedgedacht POP centre now have the certainty of two meals a day.
The Goedgedacht Trust’s Path to Prosperity (POP) centre in Riebeek-Kasteel offers children of farm workers a safe haven where they can do homework, improve their literacy, numeracy and social skills, and eat a nutritious meal.
The trust’s objective is to break the cycle of poverty. The organisation received R30,000 from a golf fundraiser which is hosted annually by Kaap Agri and its suppliers.
The Trust has experienced major challenges in its efforts to support high school learners who attend the Riebeek-Kasteel centre. One of the learners fainted at school due to hunger and this prompted the Trust programme managers to provide more support to the children by giving them more than one meal a day.
Thanks to the Kaap Agri donation, the centre is now able to also provide the learners with a sandwich to take to school in the morning. These sandwiches help to sustain the learners throughout the school day because their next nutritious meal may often only be provided after 15:30, when they arrive at the centre for after-school care.
“Survive and thrive are the two words that come up all the time. You may survive malnourishment, but you will never thrive. And for us it is all about helping the young people in our programme not only to survive, but to thrive,” says Sophie Isaacs, a Programme Manager at the centre.
The centre also had a burglary recently where some areas were vandalised. Thanks to Kaap Agri’s donation, proper security gates for doors and windows could be installed to secure the children and the centre.
Thanks to the donation, the Goedgedacht Trust was also able to provide transport for young girls to join a life skills bootcamp. “We can definitely see an impact,” says Sophie. “Some girls were able to find the courage to speak up about their challenges at home, and the centre can now offer more focused support to them and their families.”
Kaap Agri’s annual Supplier Golf Day is aligned with the company’s corporate social investment focus of providing education opportunities to vulnerable children who live in the rural areas in which the company operates.
“This was our tenth supplier golf day. Despite having to cancel the event in 2020 and 2021 because of the pandemic, it took only a few hours for the golf day to be sold out. The event has grown in size and popularity over the years, offering a unique platform for networking with our key suppliers and creating awareness of the plight of farming communities. We are grateful that we can share our philosophy of CARE with like-minded businesses to ensure that more of our stakeholders are better off because of our existence,” says Kaap Agri CEO, Sean Walsh.