THE number of young people receiving financial aid from the Queenstown Education Foundation (QEF) has increased from seven to nine this year, after the champions of the 1965Ride descended on Komani last week.
The 1965Ride is an 850km cycle tour between Johannesburg and Komani to raise funds for an educational scholarship and bursary fund for deserving learners at quality schools.
The tour, established by Tony Frost of Komani, was named after his final year as a matric learner at Queen’s College in 1965.
The cyclists are all amateur volunteers, who believe strongly that the most important priority in the country is to improve education. They all raise their own sponsorships to support this initiative.
Frost and company arrived in Komani last week where they awarded bursaries to two learners, Anita Mgaleli from Queenstown Girls’ High and Emihle Ngeva from Hoërskool Hangklip. The bursaries, worth R11 000 each, cover a large portion of the selected recipients’ school fees. Each recipient comes from a disadvantaged background and holds a record of extraordinary academic performance.
However, Frost said when awarding bursaries they also looked at what other skills a pupil possesses even outside the classroom.
“Ours is not political, but to give back to the town by strengthening its economy through education. Komani can only be transformed and elevated if we groom skilled and talented residents who will one day use their skills to uplift the town and everyone who resides in it,” he said.
“But we also need to create an environment that will attract the youngsters to want to come back and invest in this town and this can be done by giving our kids education with a strong foundation.”
Queenstown Education Foundation
He said QEF was the perfect tool to turn Komani into a centre of quality education.
The QEF was established in 2013 as an independent, non-profit, tax-exempt organisation for the purpose of attracting funding and developing programmes that aim at transforming the town into a recognised centre of educational innovation.
The foundation’s current programmes include digitisation, teacher development, bursary schemes and learner development.
The schools affiliated to the foundation include the Queenstown Girls’ High School, Queen’s College Boys’ High School, Hoërskool Hangklip High School, Laerskool Hangklip and Balmoral Girls’ Primary School.
QEF-affiliated schools offer their pupils the opportunity to gain excellent education within their own community and upon graduation these individuals become assets to the community that helped shaped them.
Chairperson of the Education Endowment Fund, Dries Ferreira, said they were in the process of attracting the previously disadvantaged schools and try to help them where they can.
“Education is a societal matter that needs us all and Komani is for us all which is why we need to work together as a cohesive unit if we want to take this town forward. Through these initiatives everyone stands to benefit because even the schools that lack resources even educators for critical subjects like mathematics also stand to benefit,” he said.
In June this year, the Johannesburg-based Education Endowment Fund awarded bursaries to tune of R77 000 to seven applicants from different grades who applied for the QEF bursary.
