Help break poverty cycle by supporting pre-school project
Vote to help project receive funding.
The Sea School Project in Toti has won through to the next round of the Helping Hand project of the year competition.
Residents of a local caravan park are unemployed and impoverished. There are 12 pre-school children who are not schooled and the project will manage a play group run by a former teacher to teach mothers how to manage their children. The project was started by Mariette van Heerden of Helping Hands Amanzimtoti.
Helping Hand launched the competition to, by the way of effective and sustainable projects, plough back R1,5-million into needy communities. A total of 27 projects received were approved to go through to the next phase of the competition. Three of these projects are based in KZN – the Cultural Festival Project in Richards Bay, Centre Project in Durban and Sea School Project in Toti.
Project organiser, Anel du Preez explained that Helping Hand regularly receives enquiries as to how a specific need can be met and how sustainable community projects can be launched and funded. “It is precisely because of these enquiries that Helping Hand wishes to plough back funds into the community and at the same time, educate participants on how to compile a good project that focuses on the alleviation, prevention and breaking of poverty and sustainable empowerment of the community,” said Du Preez.
“These three projects met the criteria and proved they could alleviate, prevent or break poverty, are feasible and fall within the prescribed budget and time framework.
Communities can vote for the projects by sending an SMS unique to a specific project. The community’s SMS votes determine how much capital Helping Hand will make available to the project for the three-month long implementation phase, which starts in May.”
To participate in the competition, each project requires a minimum of 50 unique SMS votes. However, the more votes a project receives, the more funding will be allocated to it. If, for example, the project receives 500 SMS votes, Helping Hand will fund R45,000 towards the project.
The implemented projects will be evaluated in July according to specific criteria, after which three winners will be chosen who will then receive R150,000, R100,000 and R50,000 respectively with which to further expand their projects.
The public can vote for the Sea School Project by SMSing the words: ‘PROJEK SEESKOOL’ to 38969. SMSes costs R2 each.
