About The Bishop Simeon Trust
One mother writes: ‘Both my child and I have been uplifted by your support for her schooling. Even with democracy we cannot find money otherwise to attend school regularly, or to buy books and shoes…and without matric my child has no future”.
Education is the key to a life free from poverty. The Trust works to mitigate immediate needs as well as build opportunities for the future.
Its work includes projects caring for those who are terminally ill and who will leave children behind, to ensuring those children will access schooling and be cared for in their communities, up to youth leadership programmes giving young people skills to make the most of their potential as leaders in their communities.
It also funds bursaries for trainee teachers to increase the pool of well-qualified black teachers in the country. Fees for tuition are £700 a year – well out of reach of most South Africans when average monthly income is £400 if both parents are working. Unemployment rates vary between 30 per cent and 80 per cent in the areas where the Trust is active. This means budding teachers from poor families cannot complete their training without a bursary.
At the Ekukhanyeni Centre in rural Mpumalanga, advice and support is given to people trying to access pensions and welfare rights. Adult literacy classes are offered to those who were unable to go to school. They also teach small business skills and youth development projects.
At the Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre in Sophiatown, the Trust fund’s computer literacy classes for women and unemployed youth as well as the Themba HIV Youth Project. This exciting initiative reaches 10,000 schoolchildren a year through drama and life skills with messages about teenage pregnancy and HIV, to reduce transmission rates of the virus among this vulnerable age group. Themba needs a small people-carrier to get to all the schools who want to see this amazing group and their messages for life.
Secondary education in South Africa is still in crisis: overcrowded classes, no libraries, no computers, under-qualified teachers – all historic effects of apartheid. Nine years after elections, adult illiteracy remains at 60 per cent because the schools cannot cope with such few resources.
Bishop Simeon’s bursary programme ensures around 300 young people can complete their secondary education each year and most go on to higher education. Its pre-school programme also ensures children are better prepared when they go to primary school so that black children no longer start school disadvantaged.
In the community, the Trust works with local organisations enabling skills training, co-operatives and small businesses to develop, bringing economic growth to disadvantaged areas. Tecford Centre for the Disabled in Joubert provides training and employment for 40 people with physical disabilities including metal-work, sewing and knitting, and carpentry. Tecford supplies track suits to local schools and pre-schools. They have their own choir and wheelchair basketball team competing nationally!
At Tsepho-Hope Centre, 50 children play happily with paints and crayons. You can’t tell that most are HIV positive or likely to be orphaned within a few years. While their parents are cared for by the home based care volunteers, the children are taught and fed five days a week by committed staff.
The Trust pays for the teachers and supports the volunteers – all women who began the project because their neighbours were suffering and dying alone. The key factor is poverty – food is scarce among families whose income earner has become sick or died, and the whole family becomes destitute. Feeding schemes are vital and food gardens are being developed at our projects. Support for seeds and implements is needed, as well as to fund medicines, food parcels, and toiletries.
Our history
The Bishop Simeon Nkoane CR Trust, established in the UK in 1989, exists to support the most disadvantaged South Africans through education and welfare projects. The Trust is named after one of the first African bishops in South Africa, suffragen of Johannesburg from 1982 until 1989.
At that time, apartheid policies deprived black people from adequate schooling and civil resistance to legalised racism meant that thousands of young people missed schooling altogether. The Trust provided funds to educate those young people outside South Africa. Today those young people are working in schools, business, medicine, community development and government. Four of them are now trustees of the Trust.
Desmond Tutu, patron of the Trust, writes: “Beginning with a special concern for young people, the Trust now funds formal and informal education projects in South Africa, alongside initiatives for tackling the effects of HIV on the poorest people, as well as projects providing hope for the future – to ensure apartheid’s legacy is overcome.
“With only 3 per cent of black students accessing university today, we have a long way to go in helping our young people recover from the apartheid education system, which banned them from learning in English or studying maths and sciences. Few of our young people have experienced a science lab since our schools remain ill-equipped.
“I am personally involved in and am convinced of the quality of the work of the Trust in hidden areas of South Africa – places where other funders do not reach.”