44-year-old Lindiwe Zulu, a principal at an Early Childhood Development centre in Protea Glen, celebrated Nelson Mandela Month by donating blankets and fruits to two creches in South of Johannesburg.
The event took place at Lusimuzi in Orange Farm and Arisen Shine Day Care Centre in Freedom Park.
Zulu said she decided to make these donations after realizing that these ECDs needed help. She noticed that other centres are not yet funded and are struggling to make ends meet. She took an initiative to get others involved to assist where they can by reaching out and lay a helping hand.
"As ordinary people with NPOs we are an extension of DSD as they cannot reach out to everyone. This project started in 2019 working together with the progressive ECD forum which I'm the chairperson of. We started by contributing amongst our members to make those provisions and assist ECD centres with shortfalls".
"This year 2021 we partnered with different companies and some donations were from the parents in our school. We are also working with partners to distribute food parcels to needy families and toiletries to the youth. We do a lot of this work around Protea Glen, Freedom Park and Orange Farm. With our programme, we managed to distribute blankets to four ECD centres with 144 children.
According to Zulu this program was inspired by their counterparts in Ekurhuleni.
"I started doing it, others will eventually follow it's a seed that is planted, it will germinate eventually spreading to other areas", Zulu said.