A Heideveld non-profit organisation working with women and children has received a helping hand from the Motorcycle Owners Cape Town (MOCT) club.
The club has vowed to support The Leaky Shack Foundation for a year, and on Saturday it delivered a first round of gifts, much to the delight of locals, who also watched a demonstration the riders gave outside the Great Commission church in Heideveld Road.
In one week, the club raised R7 100 and donated tinned food, bread and non-perishable food.
Waseem Salie, from MOCT, said he had been introduced to The Leaky Shack Foundation’s founder, Requel Nel, through a “friend of a friend”, Pierre Antonels.
“We do a big charity event every year, and just a week before we met to talk about what we will do, I was introduced to The Leaky Shack Foundation. All of us come from similar, underprivileged backgrounds. We were initially sceptical about supporting The Leaky Shack Foundation, but when we met, there was a connection. One of our club’s criteria for supporting an organisation, is that we are able to interact on the ground level. With this programme, there is transparency and we are welcome to visit the programme. We raised the funds by appealing to the biking community, because the idea is to assist the organisation become sustainable,” Mr Salie said.
Ms Nel said her organisation supported the community with empowerment classes for women as well as youth coaching and mentoring programmes. Other initiatives include family strengthening and parenting workshops.
“Our objective is to create an environment for women and children to feel safe, to help them live a more successful life and to foster an environment that promotes self healing, increase emotional intelligence and cognitive abilities. We want to provide the youth with the necessary tools to navigate through adolescence and to make intelligent decisions to overcome adversity and mainly to keep our kids off the streets and away from drugs and gangsters,” Ms Nel said.
The five-year-old organisation, she said, was named The Leaky Shack after the one she had grown up in. She thanked the MOCT, saying its support would make a big impact.
Mr Salie said his club had committed to donate R1 500 to The Leaky Shack Foundation every month.