OUR MISSION
Grow our Valley is an innovative initiative created by women in the South Peninsula of Cape Town activating meaningful, sustainable solutions to end systemic poverty and unemployment for women in marginalised communities.
The vision is to uplift, support and empower women with skills training and 'start up kits' - including resources - to work co-operatively in sisterhood together to create crafts, services and products that will help them to generate income to support their families, as well as the wider community.
OUR VISION
The seedling ideas we’re germinating include:
Community vegetable gardens to grow nourishing food. Sewing workshops to make beautiful bags and clothes.
Knitting workshops to make gorgeous baby toys and blankets. Community laundromats as a much needed service. ‘Township Tour Experiences' that include traditional African food. Teams of domestic and commercial cleaning services.
COMMUNITY
We are a group of diverse women from the South Peninsula of Cape Town, whose passion is to support women at a grass roots level to:
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Create uplifting circles of sisterhood in order to rise out of poverty
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Grow connected, co-operative, collaborative togetherness to boost morale and generate support and inspiring ideas when times are tough
We have a phenomenal track record as we all met during lockdown and launched an initiative, www.feedourvalley.org, in response to ensuring our most vulnerable local communities had access to good food from April to December 2020. Without this support many people would have gone hungry more often than not.
TEAMWORK
We fundraised and set up three soup kitchens in the local informal settlement of Redhill - (4,500 residents - most of whom live with 'no job no pay' status so were hit hard by lockdown) - and teams of Redhill women - the incredible Kitchen Goddesses - volunteered tirelessly to support their community, producing 3,000 meals per day, six days a week throughout the year: an incredible achievement.
We realised that continuing the scheme in this form was not sustainable, nor a healthy model for creating empowerment and self-responsibility so decided to activate dynamic change to uplift women out of a cycle of despair and poverty.