This story started at a weekly prayer meeting in 1997. Hettie de Klerk voiced the idea of a women’s club where the farmers’ wives can get together with the women that lived and worked on the farms. At these club meetings the women got together around tea and biscuits and discussed child rearing and swapped tips on growing vegetables. Despite vast differences in lifestyle and backgrounds, these women learned that they had much in common. But the farmers’ wives also saw a desperate need for an additional income for the farm workers and their families.
This birthed the Eersterivier Projects Organisation (EPO) and the idea of empowerment through embroidery. In 2003, Leonie de Lange and Ansie Loots taught a few women to make embroidered potholders. With the help of Magel Naude and a few others, the first 200 potholders sold out in a matter of weeks and the embroidery project was born.
Since then the EPO has identified and addressed the following needs: poverty, illiteracy, bad infrastructure, the lack of sufficient funding for school fees and the lack of public transport in this remote area and more. Empowerment of our local people still stays a primary objective of the EPO, and we believe that this is possible through sustained involvement and training.
During 1997 it became a non-profit organisation (NPO), and in 2012 it developed into a non-profit company (NPC) —Article 18A. We can now really celebrate our anniversary of 21 years in business.
The EPO is the only NPC in the area that is striving to empower local people to make a difference to poverty and illiteracy, with the main focus on our children. We pride ourselves of the bridges that have been built between EPO and the local community. We laugh together, cry together, work together and pray together.
As a non-profit company, we are dependent on the commitment of the community to assist us in empowering people. We would like to thank all the sponsors and supporters who believed in our mission over the past 21 years. It is only with your input, financial support and prayers that we as an organisation can really make a change in disadvantaged people’s lives. May the change we see also form part of your lives!
