In celebration of Heritage Day, Dainfern College called on their community to take part in the In My Shoes project.
The project called for the collection of new or gently worn shoes for all ages.
Together, the school’s outreach team decided that, in a year like 2020, a project for the whole school to participate in was needed and show the power of the community to make a large impact.
The project was coordinated in each phase by Siobhan de Jager from the junior prep, Eva Odendaal from the senior prep and Sonia Claassen from the college who are all Round Square representatives. Round Square is a worldwide association consisting of nearly 230 schools that aims to collaborate to offer programmes to learners in schools associated with Round Square.
Claassen said the response to the project was amazing and the community of learners and their parents banded together. “Collections for the project were held over the period of a week, but the sheer impact of the donations received was only felt on the final day, Wednesday, 23 September, when the collections were combined,” she said.
“It was amazing to see the high pile of shoes, knowing that this only took a small amount of effort, but the impact of the project would be huge.”
The school is no stranger to getting involved in various whole-college outreach projects – their earlier Mandela Day ‘Bag or Jar of Hope’ project saw 2 2891 packets of soup donated, enough for more than 11 500 people to have a warm meal.
The college’s digital media and communication spokesperson, Ashley van Aswegen said, “We are incredibly grateful to the community for their wholehearted support of this outreach initiative, which was a huge success.”
Learners filled in a specially designed label to write a short message describing their heritage for the recipient of the shoes. This project linked activities in the classroom that encouraged learners to reflect on their own heritage.
The various shoes collected will be donated to three different partner schools and crèches in the coming weeks. These schools include Mama Koka’s Crèche in Cosmo City, ReShomile Primary School and Leap 4 High School both in Diepsloot.
