Liam Bennett is a Scout in the 2nd Somerset West Troop, who is currently working towards his Springbok Scout award.
Part of this entails a community service project. While researching what he could do, he found that due to Covid-19, a large number of parents who are informal labourers were unable to work during lockdown, and many have subsequently lost their jobs.
This means that the parents are barely able to afford to feed their families, let alone buy their children stationery for the new school year.
Liam contacted various primary schools and identified six primary schools in the Helderberg area that would benefit most from stationery donations. He then started selling raffle tickets and also created a BackaBuddy crowdfunding campaign, he managed to raise over R16 500 in just over a month.
With the money raised, Liam purchased enough stationery to gift 300 foundation phase children with a basic pack consisting of: beginner pencils, HB pencils, retractable wax crayons/colour pencils, an eraser, a ruler and a pencil sharpener.
He also put together a number of “teachers packs” that consisted of oil pastels, craft glue, scissors and Pritt as well as extra HB pencils and colour pencils, which can be kept by the class teachers for use during the lessons.
On February 11, the following schools, Sir Lowry’s Pass Primary, Nomzamo Primary, Rusthof Primary, Temperance Town Primary, Danie Ackermann Primary and Methodist Primary, all received their stationary packs. The educators were all overjoyed to receive them, and will be distributing them to the most needy pupils once school starts.
Liam would like to thank all who donated money to the project, as well as the Scouts from 2nd Somerset West who assisted in packing the stationery into individual packs.
