About Soil for Life

Soil for Life, a Cape Town-based NGO, is teaching people how to build the soil and grow healthy plants so that families can sit down to plates of safe, fresh nutritious food at night, all year round. The low-cost methods enable gardeners to harvest large amounts of food from small spaces using very little water and no harmful chemicals.

Not only this, but it look for ways and means of creating opportunities for food gardeners to expand their horizons beyond the garden fence, to develop skills and talents in such a way that they are able to earn money in many other ways to pay for what they need.

Soil for Life is a Cape Town-based non-profit organisation which gives people the knowledge and skills to grow their own good, safe food and to improve their health and well-being. Through creating green, growing spaces in otherwise unfriendly and often dangerous areas  has come the recognition of the great potential of growing food to bring about much needed solutions to many problems, including food insecurity, poverty, waste management, social degradation and unsustainable environmental practices. It can encourage social upliftment, cohesion and community development.

Our supermarket shelves are crammed with food, and so, very often, are our dustbins.  Yet, nearly half of our rural people and twenty-six per cent of urban dwellers do not get enough to eat.  Roughly sixty-six percent of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa is undernourished.

The challenge that we face in the years to come is not to produce more food.  The world produces enough food. We need to deal with the real issue which is for the food to be produced by the people who need it most, for the people who need it most. This is the mission that Soil for Life has embraced – to impact on the lives of the urban and rural poor and hungry; to make it possible for all people at all times to have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food to enable them to lead healthy, active lives.

In essence, this is what the Soil for Life programme is aspiring to achieve:

Growing food; growing people; growing communities.

The organisation’s work is not just about gardening, and not just about food. It is also about ‘growing’ whole people who are able to help themselves on many fronts: survival, earning their own money, creating healthy families, improving values, dealing with inflation, problem-solving, developing creativity and resourcefulness, and building bridges of goodwill and understanding. The programme provides food for bodies, minds and souls.

Soil for Life’s focus is on education and training in organic production and ALL communities (poor and affluent alike) are able to take part in the variety of workshops and training courses that are offered.

The core teachings are around growing good, safe food and, to this end, the low-cost methods are designed to optimise production in small spaces, to build healthy soil, conserve water and to utilise rubbish in an environmentally-responsible way. They inspire people to be creative and resourceful, and to look for meaningful ways to use what they have without buying new materials and adding to the waste stream and over-burdened landfills.

Award winners at the recent Climate Change Leadership Awards in March 2010

In addition, there is a heavy emphasis on protecting the natural environment and providing the habitats that will encourage a variety of life forms to take up residence in urban and rural gardens. We teach, and re-teach, the significance of these new populations not only in the garden setting, but on a much larger scale. They are an integral part in the great web of life.

For more information about what we do please watch this video clip:

Soil For Life: Pat from Sean Tucker on Vimeo.

WE’RE GIVING YOU AN OPPORTUNITY TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN THE WORLD

Help us raise R100 000 to change the lives of 50 other men and women.
Please sponsor one of them to take part in our programme by donating, in part or full, R2 000.
That’s just R167 per month. For more information please call us on 021-794 4982

YES, you can make a difference! Every Rand counts.