Give a Man a Fish (or a green thumb)
Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. – Lao Tzu.
We believe that the extreme poverty that grips our country can in part be alleviated by utilizing the bounty that natural food gardens can provide – even in small spaces.
As part of our staff workshop program last year, we put together a successful training course called ‘Feed your family from your back garden’, which was on offer to our team. Little did we know that come 2020, the world would be galvanised towards small-scale agricultural production in urban and semi-urban spaces…
In line with our commitment to active empowerment, ‘MOVE’ our social responsibility initiative headed by Janet Holding, began conceiving ways to address the very real threat to food security in our Plettenberg Bay communities.
Together Janet and our green-fingered Melody Khan, started rolling out a program that trains unemployed people with limited space and resources to feed their families from their own backyard gardens.
Our pilot project was completed in June and 7 proud gardeners have received their certificates of achievement. They eagerly participated in building a tiered tyre garden at Old Nick Village, learnt how to make fertilizer with kitchen scraps, how to source cheap healthy seed, make compost and create wall gardens. They are now adept at taking cuttings and propagating an ongoing food garden throughout the seasons, in tiny spaces!
At the end of the course each participant goes home with a starter pack of compost, tyres, containers, seeds and the shared use of garden tools.
Bountiful backyard haul
All the hard work is starting to come to fruition after the August rains. Melody harvested our first crop of spinach from the workshop garden at Old Nick, which has now been distributed to the five soup kitchens in Kurland Village.
We hope to share and encourage in our ongoing commitment to using our resources to give others the tools to improve their lives.
Mungo prioritises in equal measure good design and doing good. This means not only taking care to produce beautiful textiles of high quality, but also keeping at our core a desire to do better, and to rethink the way we do things. This led us to open our very own CSR, MOVE, through which we champion causes that support and empower the natural and human environments in which we operate. Through MOVE, we recognise our responsibility to take nothing for granted, and to place equal emphasis on the triple bottom line: people, planet and profit.
