“No child will go hungry, not on my watch,” the secretary of the Children’s Feeding Trust, Maureen van Staden, has vowed as the trust celebrates its 60th anniversary.
The retired teacher said she had always been passionate about serving and aligned herself with the trust mission – “children will not go hungry”.
“It’s nice to know that you are touching someone’s life in some small way. We’ve got so much and some people don't have [anything],” Van Staden said this week.
The trust feeds over 7,000 children a day around the Bay.
The trust, which formally began in the apartheid era in 1958 as the PE Mayor’s School Feeding Fund, crossed racial and location boundaries and sought to provide food for hungry children at school.Van Staden, who has been with the trust for 13 years, runs the small Walmer Park office which oversees funding of 16 beneficiaries with R120,000 per quarter, which pays for the purchase of nutritious foods and medical supplies.
“We started in 1958 to address the needs of hungry children at school.
“In 1994 we changed our focus as the government took over the school feeding programmes. We focused on preschool children and those children who through physical or mental disability cannot attend school.”
Using year-round fundraising campaigns such as a bookshop at the Walmer Community Hall and greetings cards – available at supporting local pharmacies – among other methods, the trust still maintains support of all its beneficiaries.
One of the beneficiaries is the Missionvale Care Centre. Sabrina Lambert of the centre says it would not be able to feed people around Missionvale without the financial donation from the trust.
“We feed 700 people and 280 children daily and give food parcels to 700 people weekly,” Lambert said.
“In the past eight years of working together, the trust and our centre have developed a good relationship – they are more than just donors.”
Van Staden said that despite feeding many families around the Bay, she worried that she did not feed everyone in need.
“It feels good knowing that we have fed hungry children.
“Hunger is a growing problem – unemployment is a growing problem,” she said.