Focus on iThemba, Danie van den Heever, so aptly puts it “If you plant for a day you plant flowers, if you plant for years then you plant trees, if you plant for eternity you plant ideas and time into the lives of young people.” 2019 has undoubtedly been a year of planting for the team and as in nature, the foundation of our programmes lie rooted in the vision of Growing Hearts and Minds with the promise of producing the fruit of life-altering positive change.
We were blessed to be able to enlarge our reach by welcoming two new beneficiaries to both our Early Childhood Development and iThemba Scholars Programmes this year. Pre-Schools, Lethu’sizo and Mba’lenhle, which are based in the wider area of the Valley of 1000 Hills, rounded our Pre-School Partnerships up to ten. Through the valuable support of forward-thinking donors and partners, we have seen tremendous growth and transformation in all our Pre-Schools. Project Joy, otherwise known as Entokozweni Pre-School, is one monumental highlight for our team as we officially opened the school’s newly upgraded facilities in August 2019.
Our iThemba Scholars Programme has been warmly embraced by Waterfall Schools and this year was the first for our two new and youngest scholars to enter the programme at Grade 000 at Waterfall Pre-Primary. We currently support ten amazing scholars within the programme and will be increasing this intake to 12 in 2020.
We are excited to announce that we have committed to another transformation project called Project Star which we hope to press the button on early next year. We are blessed to have a few partners already express a keen interest in what will be our third Pre-School upgrade and we hope to bring life-altering positive change to Project Star through efforts of true partnership and collaboration.
*Photo credit: Natalie Myles