Yes we can, and we did
#MandelaMosaic yields thousands of food cans
Mandela Day this year was an amazing experience! Our much anticipated #MandelaMosaic building day at Canal Walk Shopping Centre was a roaring success. We built a massive effigy of Nelson Mandela using food tins donated by Rhodes Quality Foods and members of the public, all of which will be donated to social development projects supported by LEAP Science and Maths Schools in Langa, Gugulethu, Crossroads, Philippi and Delft. We’re still busy tallying the total number donated, but it’s somewhere close to 18,000 cans. 17,016 cans were used to construct the mosaic, each one was covered with either an orange or black circle and the end result was breath-taking. Look for #MandelaMosaic on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to see the day’s events including the wonderful entertainment performances.
Thousands of volunteers worked tirelessly with LEAP School students to cover cans and build Madiba’s image. Teams from our corporate sponsors Carrick Wealth, First National Bank, ABSA, Indigo Brands, the Hyprop Foundation, Clickatell, Greenbox and the Ben & Shirley Rabinowitz Foundation supported us with financial donations, cans and volunteers. They got to speak with LEAP students and learnt more about what we do and gave them valuable advice about their future academic and career plans.
There were also a number of celebrity participants and 2 councillors from the City of Cape Town Mayoral Committee – Executive Deputy Mayor Ian Nielson and Councillor Xanthea Limberg. They worked hard and added extra sparkle to our event, with some celebrities inundated with requests for pictures by very excited LEAP students. LEAP board members lent their support to the event by coming to help us build, raising and donating funds and spreading the word to get volunteers to participate. Amy Kleinhans-Curd, LEAP Schools patron and a former Miss South Africa, closed off the event with words of encouragement and congratulations for the impact the food collection and fundraising drive yielded in support of hunger relief and education development and for the hard work everyone who participated put in.
We’d like to thank everyone who made this event possible, particularly Canal Walk Shopping Centre, the Hyprop Foundation, Rhodes Quality Foods and Smile FM. Mandela Day is about community, sharing our resources and working together and we are proud to have been part of that process. We look forward to Mandela Day 2017. Thank you Madiba!
