LESF
What does your company do?
Food insecurity is a huge challenge in township schools despite the food nutrition scheme. School food gardens offered a solution for hungry learners, child headed households and vulnerable homes in the community. LESF seeks to empower school principals to envisage the garden as more than a food source (which is foremost and vital), but to also consider it to be an entrepreneurial enterprise where school-community partnerships are strengthened and learners are offered opportunities to develop entrepreneurial skills. LESF focuses on life success not just school success for learners where the chances of them completing schools and/or making it to university is statistically low. The reimagining of the school food garden as a third space of learning and as third stream income opens possibilities for learners, and schools who have to be empowered to take initiatives beyond a curriculum that sells learners a false dream.
What is your biggest success?
My greatest achievement is have catalysed a vision with communities who now dream bigger about the future of their children. For “enterprise” to be nurtured and encouraged and where children are offers opportunities to be job creators rather than job seekers. Such a change in perspective does not come from only striving for a good matric pass rate but to offer learners through skills based education, through experimentation and through innovation to develop insights into a future that is possible.
What has been your biggest hurdle?
The greatest hurdle has been convincing communities that the labour of the land is not a dead end, but the means to many possibilities. Working in the garden had been a stigma. Parents felt that children were not coming to school to labour in the garden as punishment but rather how teachers were repurposing curriculum so that the garden became a learning laboratory. However constant communication, a flourishing garden and an open school gate where community members could participate helped to develop relationships. As learners and teachers engage in the garden as a learning laboratory it becomes more than just a food producing enterprise but a third learning space where a child’s future is nurtured by teachers, parents, community members and local businesses.
