Community Service and Outreach

During our Passion programmes we strive to instill the following qualities in our learners:

• God
• Integrity
• Love and respect for other people
• Service without boundaries
• Hartbeespoort our community
• Nations

Once a term, we prepare different activities, for a whole week to celebrate our Passions.

We follow a six-day cycle at our school.  Once during the cycle, we have a session where we come together as a school to have Praise and Worship. This is the time when we celebrate Jesus our Lord and Saviour, through worship and a message. We also have a special week where we emphasize the importance of having a relationship with God and what that implies.

As we are a Christian school, we make time during the school year to show and guide learners on how to share their love and compassion through our four passion programs that we do every year.  This involves the whole school, from gr. RRR to Gr. 12.

1. Passion for God
2. Passion for Nations
3. Passion for People (community service and outreach)

Teachers are divided into the three groups which then work out a plan on how to promote this Passion for one whole week of the term.  Every day during that week they do one activity about either God or a nation or people in our community.

This includes our buddy system where the little ones have a ‘buddy’ in the higher grades who look out for them and do an activity together during the passion week.

 

Passion for God:

Passion for God is usually the first Passion we celebrate because we would like our learners to become spiritually active and to “live” a life filled with God, integrity, respect for themselves and caring for other.

Passion for Nations:

Each class is encouraged to “adopt” a country.  When adopting the country, we inspire the learners to find out more about the country that they have adopted, to be aware of different events happening in that country and also to pray for the people of their adopted country.

The cherry on the cake, is usually when we end one of our special Passion celebration weeks by spending the last day with our ‘buddies.’  A buddy is when a learner adopts a younger friend from another class in the Foundation Phase – he/she then acts as guardian for this younger child. The senior learner undertakes to be involved in various aspects and opportunities of his/her adopted child’s life.

Passion for People and Community:

During this week we make the learners aware of the importance to help others.  We normally start at “home, our school” where we encourage the learners to reach out to our ground staff.  After that we reach out to our community.

Different grades can choose an organisation which they would like to visit and support. By doing this learners can then reflect on their own situation and hopefully realise the importance of their involvement in the community and that they CAN make a difference even though it sometimes feels as if a small contribution cannot make a difference.

Here are some of the places we have visited thus far:

Visit to HAWS

The grade 6 group visits HAWS as part of our Passion programme.  Hartbeespoort Animal Welfare Society (HAWS) is an independent, registered non-profit organization.  They provide welfare services for abandoned, neglected and abused pets, farm animals and wildlife.

They have 6 full-time staff who are helped by a group of volunteers, all of whom are dedicated to alleviate the suffering of sick, neglected and abandoned animals.

As they do not receive government assistance, their operation has to be funded entirely by voluntary donations and fundraising.  We support the institution by taking animal food and blankets and toys when we go visit them. 

Other communities that we visit are:

• Huis Lesedi learners go and hold the babies and they collect nappies and toiletries for the home.
• Huis van Velden – learners and mummies knitted colourful squares, we attached the squares to make blankets for the elderly.
• Police Station – we went to say a BIG THANK YOU for serving our community and we treated them with some cake.
• People in need: we made food parcels and sandwiches for the people standing on the corner of the street.
• Ennis Thabong: We collect Oats or Pronutro and milk and donate it to the kindergarten at Ennis Thabong.
• Dog’s Town