Since the vision for community transformation in September of 1998, Vastfontein Community Transformation had grown steadily into a fully-fledged non-profit company with its main focus on Good Quality Christian Education for community members who did not have access to or could not afford such a service. Year-on-year growth from pre-school to grade 12 took place over a period of 20 years with the current focus on increasing the capacity of the school by building a secondary school complex with a multi-functional sports facility. The school was only registered with the department in 2019 and a strategic decision was made in 2022 to move the school into its own legal entity to comply with the Department of Education requirements.

Other community transformation focus’ areas started in 2008 which included training of lay pastors, a wellness centre comprising of an Occupation Therapist, Play Therapist, Social worker, counsellor and access to an Education Psychologist to support the development of the learners of the school and community as well as agriculture skills development programs. The need for care homes for orphans and vulnerable children was identified and 3 care homes were built between 2010 and 2014 having the capacity to take care of 18 children – these were closed at the end of 2020 due to the inability to successfully register the facility with Department of Social Development over the period of 6 years.

The agriculture skills development program became the flagship for community transformation however the impact of the program was mostly seen where we trained other communities rather than uplifting and transforming our own community. The program came to a grinding halt in 2020 when the COVID19 pandemic struck.

Many of our monthly donors, strategic funding partners and project funders withdrew during or after the pandemic due to their own financial crises. The loss of funders together with the strategic decision to move the Education leg of the organisation into its own legal entity, has brought us to a tipping point where we had to take stock and rethink our strategy for community transformation. Through lots of prayer and many conversations we are convinced that our reason for existence and our calling is to focus on helping land owners and under resourced members in our community, especially those who are unemployed and burdened with systemic poverty. Our mission is to enabling them to become economically self-sustainable and start contributing to the economy rather than being consumers of it.

Taking a line out of John Perkins’ book “With justice for All” we agree that

“The poor need something more than handouts. They need the means to build a better life for themselves. We must bring into the poor community the basic education the people need we must teach them the vocational and management skills required to start community based economic enterprises” (pp. 153-156).

With this in mind our Strategy for the next 10 years is to Transform our community by empowering 100 landowners in our community to establish economically sustainable agriculture enterprises on their underutilized land together with equipping youth with agriculture and business skills to enable them to either be gainfully employed in the agriculture sector or start their own agriculture related businesses.