Due to the lockdown restrictions linked to Covid-19, Dainfern College decided to challenge families to take the spirit of outreach into their homes to celebrate 67 minutes for Mandela Day.
Learners of grades 0 to 12 were all encouraged to provide ‘hope’ to vulnerable communities in a drive that was dubbed Bags or Jars of Hope.The school’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 contains one cup of rice, about one cup of lentils and one cup of soup mix, as well as 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.
The school community was encouraged to get involved and many families spent the Mandela Day weekend working together to contribute to this initiative.
Head of outreach at the school Cheryl Coetzee said, “The school was thrilled with the generous response from our community which has culminated in a staggering 2 891 packs of soup being donated, enough to feed a hearty meal to more than 11 500 people.”
The soup packs will be distributed to the school’s partner organisations in Diepsloot and Cosmo City, as well as Charity Begins With Me, which feeds 1 000 children every weekend.
