Fairhills: Rooted in goodness
Monday, 3 February, 2014
Fairhills
Over the past 7 years a very successful Fairtrade initiative, Fairhills, was established between Origin Wine and the employees of the Du Toitskloof Cooperative in Rawsonville.
The success of Fairhills has seen the employees and their families gain many life changing benefits, with more planned for the future. One of the first benefits was to erect day-care facilities on the farms for the children. Today more than 200 infants are left at the day-care facilities every day where they are fed two meals a day and are looked after by fully trained staff. All staff are members of the community that have been trained by funds from the project. Classrooms have been built at the new Lorraine Primary school and a computer centre with 50 computers is fully operational. In the mornings children from the day-cares visit the computer centre for introductory lessons and in the evenings the farm workers get the opportunity to also improve the skills on the computers. For the last 3 years the top two learners that have graduated from High school have received bursaries from Fairhills that fully covered their tertiary education.
Further social benefits include:
(1) Purchase of Fairhills bus;
(2) Establishing entrepreneurial initiatives e.g. Fairhills Craft and Coffee shop;
(3) Undertaking the largest adult literacy program in the Western Cape;
(4) Alcohol Rehabilitation Program;
(5) Housing Renovation Program.
(6) A mobile medical unit to visit farms and schools
(7) Dedicated Health Post to administer chronic medication and see to day to day ailments
In light of the success achieved with Fairhills, Origin Wine has proceeded to develop a Fairtrade Organic initiative in the Northern Cape and is in process of developing another Fairtrade Project with producers in the Worcester region.