Would you like to make a donation to charity instead of giving or receiving a Christmas or Birthday present?

Here are a number of helpful gifts – that keep on giving:

• £5 will buy seedlings for a school vegetable garden – enabling pupils to learn how to grow food. The produce is made into nutritious school dinners or used in cookery classes by vocational Hotel and Catering courses. School vegetable gardens are watered and maintained by community workers over the holidays.

• £7 will buy enough wool to knit 7 childrens’ hats – effectively keeping the disadvantaged warm. This gift is a great encouragement to volunteers of the Waterberg Knitting Club who obtain wool at wholesale prices to produce blankets and warm clothing for the needy. They are distributed by nursing Sister Grace when she conducts home visits and pave the way for her to help the needy.

• £10 will buy a pair of hard-wearing school shoes – equipping disadvantaged pupils and encouraging parents to register their children for school at the beginning of the academic year in January. This results in children walking to school with enthusiasm and prevents a ‘street kid’ culture developing. It is carefully administered by volunteers running Lethabo Kids Club in the township of Leseding.

• £12 will equip a school-girl with sanitary protection while she is in secondary school. Packs of washable eco-pads made by Dignity Dreams, a not-for-profit NGO thats provide sewing-at-home work for women in Pretoria, are distributed by a school nurse after pupils receive a talk on puberty and the importance of contraception. We want to equip every girl in the region so that they do not share pads or miss lessons. This gift encourages communication with the school nurse who is trying to reduce teenage pregnancy that instills poverty and limits girls from reaching their potential.

• £15 will buy a food parcel to feed a needy family for a week – food purchased at competitive prices is packed by volunteers and carefully distributed to about fifty needy people in the community every month. It is usually the chronically ill, the elderly, orphans and or very young single parents who benefit, along with needy people who do not qualify for official social security support for some reason. Local farmers add to the food parcels when they can. Food parcel distribution opens the door for additional nursing support with advice on health and hygiene.

• £110 will send a pupil on a 5-day residential course at Lapalala Wilderness School – this grants a fantastic opportunity for a promising student to learn about ecology, achieve good academic results and find out about careers in wildlife conservation. It is one of the best ways of promoting understanding about the importance of anti-poaching.

Many of these gifts benefit schools of the Waterberg and encourage volunteers.

THANK YOU for funding The Waterberg Trust and the projects we support.

Donating through JustGiving works well as UK Gift Aid is automatically claimed and they accept 8 different currencies. Please click here and specify what gift you would like to chose.

There are a number of other ways you can donate listed on our website here.

If you would like a card with details of the gift that you can give away, please leave a comment in the comments below and we will get back to you.