The Breede Centre located in McGregor, South Africa, has training facilities with emphasis on practical skills for the local unemployed who are yearning for a better life. Our courses range from longer term Handyman and Cooking training to short term Garden and Needlework training to Entrepreneurial and Computer courses.
The centre also offers afternoon and holiday activities for the local children as well as language and math support.
The centre also offers afternoon and holiday activities for the local children as well as language and math support.
McGregor Community
McGregor is a small town with about 3000 residents and surrounded by a large farming community. Other than farming and tourism, McGregor offers little other employment. School leavers and women can get seasonal work (December – February) in the factory in Ashton (about 35km away) and on the farms. The men are mostly involved in the building trade including bricklayers, painters and a few carpenters. Most qualified plumbers, electricians and some builders are white. Other than some builders, very few of the coloured and black families run their own businesses.
All guest houses, restaurants and weekend accommodation on farms are owned by white people. Jobs are scarce and skills of school leavers are low. Many students do not complete the final school examination and leave school early, further complicating the situation. Unemployment, alcoholism, teenage pregnancies and poverty are rife
Through training and home industries the Centre hopes to establish many little centers of self-employment with a central marketing arm.
The Impulse
Pieter Holloway is a native South African who has been living and teaching Mathematics and crafts in the McGregor High School for 12 years. He witnessed first hand the devastating effect the lack of opportunity in education and employment has had upon the lives of young people.
He started a woodwork business and training centre on a very small scale but envisioned a local training centre with its own campus and facilities so that the young people would not have to leave the village for skills training.
This would counter the demoralizing drift to the cities that alienates them from their family and community support structures, and will enable the setting up of home industries. And so the idea of The Breede Centre was born…
The Team: Dinah, Dorothy, Pieter, Dawid, Frederick, Briar
