Sacred Heart College had a Heritage Day celebration on September 20 at the school.
The theme of the day was ‘Celebrating our Natural Heritage and Biodiversity’.
The school is always tackling and highlighting social issues and this year they wanted to use the day to highlight and empower its learners on the issue of climate change.
The parent’s community had programmes planned for the day to educate the high school learners.
The date coincides with the international call to action for climate justice.
An alumnus of Sacred Heart College, Danielle van der Byl, led the discussion on the People’s Climate Justice Charter on the day.
“The objective of the day was to create awareness and provide insight to the learners, parents and teachers about the environment from the immediate school environment to the broader South African context; to challenge our current assumptions about how we interact with our environment, and to better understand our responsibility to our environment as citizens of the world; and to appreciate the natural evolution of our heritage, and the richness and nutritional value of our indigenous foods,” said Lynn Walker, Sacred Heart marketing coordinator.
The day was filled with lots of fun educational sessions. One of the sessions, Indigenous Food for Climate Adaptation, was an interactive food preparation session making indigenous foods from sorghum, millet and jugo beans.
The session was facilitated by a parent, Aline de Gouveia.
Nicola Wilmot, a Geography educator at the school will do a presentation on her expedition to the Antarctica, highlighting the importance of looking at the impact of climate change there in order to determine the effects that climate change will have on the southern hemisphere.
Meryl Plasket and Gino Govender from the Naledi Village, an organisation that deals with developing a vision and strategy for community-driven livelihoods, also had the opportunity to talk to the learners.
The day was also graced by national and provincial government representation from the Department of Environmental Affairs and Gauteng Department of Agricultural and Rural Development.
