Chairman's Letter

Dear friends of the Spirit Foundation,

It’s pretty easy to be fed up with and frustrated by government, whether national, provincial or local.

Crime, corruption, power cuts, water shortages and potholes are the standard fare experienced by many. For thousands of our citizens even potable water is a distant ‘luxury’ rather than a constitutional right realised. We also seem to be leading the world in gender-based violence, while hundreds of thousands of our young learners are at the receiving end of an inadequate education system.

I could go on, but instead of bemoaning the poor state of service delivery in our country and criticising from the sidelines, we at the Spirit Foundation have made a lifelong commitment to making a positive difference to our beguiling country.

We are realistic enough to acknowledge that we cannot change all of society for the better, but we are able to demonstrate and measure the real impact we have made and continue to make in the areas of scholar education, community development and wildlife.

Indeed, impact and measurement are two of the hardest things to demonstrate in the field of philanthropy, yet at the Spirit Foundation we achieve this constantly.

The Spirit Education Foundation measures success not just by the number of children we fund in our Early Childhood Development Programme, or the growing number of SEF scholars who matriculate with a Bachelor’s Pass, but by the holistic quality of the education provided through our programmes. In fact, the real reward for us is to see our scholars develop into happy, successful and fulfilled young adults and productive contributors to society.

There is no price one can place on assisting visually impaired, hard of hearing or physically challenged youngsters, but this is what the Spirit Community Foundation does every day. In this edition of the Full Circle, you will see our work in graphic detail, but more importantly, you will witness the joy and satisfaction your donations bring to these disadvantaged communities.

Yet, there is another pernicious crisis unfolding in our country that is less visible and receives little attention and that is the existential threat to our wildlife, and by definition, our endangered species. At the Spirit Foundation, we believe that humanity can only survive and thrive if it is in harmony and balance with nature. Currently we are far from being in balance and the scales are tipping ever more rapidly against our iconic wildlife in their fight or survival. Again, rather standing by and watching the demise of our wildlife, the Spirit Wildlife Foundation has expanded its support for a range of programmes that literally save the lives of our endangered species such as rhino, with a view to protecting and preserving our unique wildlife heritage for today’s and future generations.

While the Spirit Foundation continuously demonstrates and measures our impact across all our programmes, we cannot achieve this alone. We need your support and so if you identify with our work, would like to become involved or donate (with tax relief) to any of our programmes, please simply go onto our website, (https://spiritf.org/) and we would love to welcome you.

Until next time, simply do good out there.

Yours sincerely,