To spread hope, Dainfern College decided to challenge their families to take the spirit of outreach into their homes to celebrate 67 minutes for Mandela Day.
Due to the continued isolation restrictions linked to Covid-19 this year, the college community was encouraged to get involved and many families spent Mandela Day weekend working together to contribute to
this initiative.
The college’s outreach team set the goal to collect 1 670 soup packs. Each pack of soup can feed four people, and a collection of this magnitude would ensure that 6 700 people would be fed.
Each soup pack contained one cup of rice, about one cup of lentils and about one cup of soup mix, barley, split peas, a packet of dried instant soup of any flavour and an unwrapped stock cube.
“The mix is stored in used glass jars or Ziploc bags, and the contents to fill four-packs cost less than R100,” said the college’s digital media and communications officer, Ashley van Aswegen.
The project was given a whole school focus, with families from Grade 0 through to Grade 12, all contributing to provide hope to vulnerable communities in a drive that was dubbed Bags or Jars of Hope. “Families got involved in shopping for the ingredients, packing and labelling the bags or jars and dropping them off at the collection point,” she added.
Head of outreach at the college Cheryl Coetzee said, “The school was thrilled with the generous response from our community which has culminated in a staggering 1 800 packs of soup being donated, enough for a hearty meal for more than 7 200 people.”
The distribution of the soup packs has already begun with the two Cosmo City crèches supported by Dainfern College, ReShomile and Leap 4 schools in Diepsloot, Jordan House, Support House, a local orphanage and the KwaZulu-Natal Relief Fund, all receiving donations from the Dainfern College community.
