The Greenpop Foundation, Christel House South Africa and the digital insurance platform, Naked are collaborating to enhance food security among vulnerable communities.
Christel House SA is participating in Greenpop’s Family Food Garden programme this year in line with its objective of supporting the parents of students enrolled at the non-profit school. The school, based in Cape Town, serves more than 1000 students from severely impoverished communities on the Cape Flats and helps them achieve upward economic mobility and realise their goals, dreams and human potential.
The three organisations announced the collaboration at a workshop for beneficiaries hosted today at Christel House South Africa.
The Family Food Garden project aims to address food inaccessibility and financial insecurity by equipping individuals with the skills to sustainably grow their own food at home. Greenpop has partnered with Urban Harvest to deliver in-person and digital training as well as Family Garden Pods to the people who participate in the programme.
The Family Garden Pod is a compact, self-contained vegetable gardening system that includes a composting worm farm and a vegetable garden. During the workshop, the beneficiaries received their Pods, training materials, and planted their first seedlings.
Funding for this initiative will come from the Naked Difference – an initiative in which Naked donates leftover premiums received from customers to causes that they’ve chosen, rather than taking it as profit. Both Greenpop and Christel House South Africa have been Naked Difference partners since the programme’s launch in 2019.
Scalable answer to the food crisis
By increasing knowledge about gardening, cooking, nutrition, and entrepreneurship, the project empowers individuals and communities to become more food secure and financially independent. This urban and rural micro-farming initiative offers a scalable, bottom-up answer to numerous challenges that beset South Africa, including dropping numbers of large commercial farms and crop farming households.
The Greenpop Foundation has spent the last decade restoring forest ecosystems, bringing nature into urban spaces, and running inspiring and creative campaigns and events to promote environmental stewardship.
The Family Food Garden project builds on this with a vision of South Africa in which every home has a productive food garden that will provide sustainable access to fresh produce. Greenpop will use its Naked Difference funds this year to advance the Family Food Garden programme with partners like Christel House.
Carla Wessels, Partnerships & Communications Manager at Greenpop stated that ‘even before the economic damage of the pandemic, food insecurity was a crisis in South Africa, with 6.5 million people suffering from hunger in 2019. Now, there is an even more urgent need to invest in scalable, sustainable solutions that enable vulnerable communities and people to become food secure and financially independent.’
Nutrition to help children meet their potential
Christel House SA is a non-profit school with a single mission: to break the cycle of poverty. It offers no-fee scholarships to students from some of Cape Town’s poorest neighbourhoods and supports them for 19 years through character-based and career-focused education. Adri Marais, CEO at Christel House South Africa, says that access to nutritious and sufficient food is essential for helping children grow into healthy adults who can realise their full potential.
‘We are excited that 20 parents from our school will have the opportunity to learn micro-farming skills that will enable them to sustainably grow their own food at home and improve their livelihoods,” she adds. ‘We’re also grateful to the Naked Difference for providing further funds we are using to address needs such as prescription reading glasses, student excursions and drama therapy to promote mental health for our students, as well as workshops to empower Christel Houseparents.’
Sumarie Greybe, co-founder at Naked commented that ‘after these two years of the pandemic in which South Africa has endured so much, businesses with a purpose beyond profit have a key role to play in rebuilding a more prosperous and equitable nation.’
Pictures: Greenpop/Julliette Bisset
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