Interviews Archives - Wander Cape Town

Interview with Protect the West Coast CEO, Mike Schlebach

Katja Mamacos — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 09:38:57 +0000

In this interview, we talk with Mike Schlebach, a founder of Protect the West Coast (PTWC), about the organization’s origins and impact. PTWC was started by a group of Cape Town-based surfers and environmentalists who became alarmed by the increasing threat of mining on the West Coast’s pristine beaches. Initially focused on raising public awareness, PTWC has since engaged in legal actions and community mobilization to protect these areas.

Mike discusses the ongoing damage caused by companies like MSR and Trans Hex, who have been granted mining rights with little oversight or public input. He highlights PTWC’s current initiatives, including the development of Ripl, an online portal designed to empower communities to oppose harmful mining projects.

This interview offers a look into the struggles and successes of PTWC, showcasing the critical work being done to protect one of South Africa’s last natural frontiers.

What made you start Protect the West Coast?

Mike Schlebach: There were a few of us that founded Protect the West Coast together. Basically just the group or regular users of the West Coast. None of us actually live up there.

Katja Mamacos: It’s mostly Cape Town based?

Mike: Yeah, we all are Cape Town based. In fact, our legal guy is from Durban. Before he got involved with Protect the West Coast, he’d never been up the West Coast! Now he’s been a few times. But yeah, it started with a small group of surfers that frequent the area and gradually became aware of all these new encroachments of the mining industry down into areas that were largely pristine and underdeveloped or with no development at all.

So I think it was like mid 2020 when we found out that there was a mining company, an Australian mining company called MSR that had just been given a stretch of coastline that included these 10 pristine beaches to mine. It was given to them without them having to go through a whole new mining application.

They have an existing mine there, a very big mine, and they just got this 10 beach extension approved. And that was out in the media a little bit. And that was a light bulb moment for a few people.

My involvement came a little while later when I just got out of a business that I founded. I had some time and energy and I took a trip up into that area and got to see for myself what was really going on up there.

The history of mining on the west coast is long, the diamond industry has been mining up in the Northern Cape area, on the beaches up there, for the last hundred odd years. But the creep is coming fast and furiously down the coastline.

A screenshot from this interactive map of the status of all known mineral extraction activities in the region

On your site it says there are 30+ applications.

Mike: Yeah, including prospecting applications. When you look at the maps at the moment, the West Coast is severely under siege.

Apart from inland mining on the West Coast, there’s the beach mining. And then you’ve got on the near shore — most of the coastline has been divided up into diamond concessions. And then you’ve got diamond concessions further out to sea and now they’ve got oil and gas out to sea as well, you know. So it’s just a complete shit show.

Katja: It really is! So did you start with the legal or the informing the public side of it?

Mike: Yeah, so for the first two years of PTWC’s existence, our main mandate was to bring what was happening on the West Coast from a mining perspective into the public domain.

Katja: Ja that whole coastline is very out of sight.

Mike: Out of sight, out of mind. There’s very few communities up there. And it’s not a big tourist area either, so we saw it as one of the last frontiers, as an area that we could go and visit, surf and free camp and do all these things that you can’t do anywhere else in the world. Yeah, not so much anymore. But there are also these communities up there that have been severely affected, especially in the northern regions, by the diamond mining industry.

And if you think about De Beers, which is the biggest diamond producer and seller in the world… They extracted all of the early billions from that Northern Cape area. And they’ve left that area completely unrehabilitated. Some of the community there, they’re some of the poorest in the country — some of those towns have like a 75% unemployment rate, and those were all diamond areas.

Why is it that the mining companies aren’t legally obligated to restore the area?

Mike: They are. The government, through the Department of Minerals and Energy, is supposed to be providing oversight. They are the same entity that is approving the applications, and then they’re supposed to provide oversight and things like that as it goes along, but they don’t do that. They don’t have the capacity and so it’s a complete free for all. The approvals and the applications historically have been woeful at best, in terms of the content of these applications. They’re copy and paste.

Katja: They really don’t have to put in much effort.

Mike: Ja, and then they’ll say, okay, we’ll give X amount to the local communities. We’ll have a one and a half million rand rehabilitation fund when they’re looking at a couple of billion rand mining site, and they’ll say we’ll provide X amount of jobs. But ultimately they don’t; nothing transpires as it should…

So PTWC was really about bringing the mining story on the West Coast into the public, and now it’s transitioning into a new phase. Last year we took one of the mining companies to court — Trans Hex, which has been mining on the West Coast for the last 60 or 70 years. And to date, we have not been able to find a single rehabilitated site that they’ve mined.

Katja: I saw you described it as a moonscape on your blog.

Mike: Yes! For example, the area between Hondeklip Bay and Alexander Bay. It’s a stretch of coastline that spans about 230 kilometers, and it’s been severely ravaged by the diamond mining industry. It’s not just De Beers, it’s De Beers, it’s Transhex, it’s Alex Core, which is a state owned entity.

And that area, if you drive through it, you can look in and see parts of it — it’s 230 kilometers long and about 20 or 30 kilometers wide. And it’s just… it looks like what I would think the moon looks like. And a lot of these companies are moving further and further south down the coastline.

In the middle of 2022, Transhex started mining the beaches of Dooringbaai. That’s why we took them to court, because there was no public engagement. No one knew who they were, they just showed up and started mining and it turns out that the Department of Minerals had given them a new permit to mine and we thought that was illegal.

The Tronox mine, by Jacque Smit

Katja: Yeah, without any community engagement.

So with the community engagement, I know you’re working on a comments and appeals portal. How’s that going?

Mike: Yes, Ripl! We’re calling it Ripl. And Ripl is in the final throes of coming to life. We are hoping to have it live in the next two weeks.

It’s been a two year project at least. A lot easier said than done, but it will be a first of its kind in South Africa. It’s a portal that allows the public to really engage with the mining sector on the West coast.

So when a new application comes in, we will get notified. We put it on the portal and the portal sends out an alert to everybody that signed up for it. And then people can go through the details of the application, everything will be there and then they can provide comments and appeals and things like that when the time is right.

Katja: That’s really great!

Mike: Yeah, it’s really great because historically the amount of people that engage with these applications, you can count on one hand. You get four or five people that are knowledgeable and they’ve been completely overwhelmed, because there’s just so much going on.

So now we’re looking to get hundreds, if not thousands of normal people just registering their views. And then, it’s a great opportunity for specialists and scientists and things like that, who know a lot about how these things should work to also have their say. It should make life much more difficult for both the government and for the mining applicants just to push these things through, because there’s this proper pushback.

Katja: Ja, because we also have a lot of people who know so much about our local environment, who would definitely get involved if it’s accessible.

Mike: Exactly, that’s the idea. And then we also want to take this opportunity to the youth. We want to go and roll this out at schools and get the youth involved. Because this is their future. Over the three and a half years since we’ve been in existence, we’ve had a lot of quite a bit of engagement from schools and youngsters at schools that are like, how can we help? How can we get involved? And this is a wonderful way for them to do that.

Katja: That’s fantastic. Because until now, every time a new application comes through, you have to find it and register as interested. This is really great, that interested parties can stay consistently involved.

Do you think it’ll be possible to roll it out in different parts of the country?

Mike: Absolutely, yeah we do. This portal was created by a local digital agency that has done it all pro bono — a digital agency called ibay. It’s taken a massive effort on their behalf and our behalf just to get it to where it is.

And the idea really is, like you’ve alluded to, to start with the West Coast and then gradually expand it. But there are costs involved. It’s SMS based, as we’re trying to appeal to the affected areas and affected people and communities that don’t have email and don’t have the internet. But they have a phone and they have SMS. And there’s a cost to an SMS, so if you’ve got tens of thousands of people doing this thing, it can cost quite a lot of money. but yeah, but that is the plan

Katja: And then put it on a subscription service for those who can afford it? Or how would you cover the cost?

Mike: We would get sponsors. We could maybe even get one of the big cell phone providers on board. It’s petty cash for them.

Katja: Okay, lovely. That’s really exciting!

You refer in your 2024 goals to a Strategic Environmental Assessment. What needs to happen to get the government to commit to doing that along the entire coast?

Mike: That’s a very good question. In the last few years we wrote to Barbara Creasy when she was the minister of environment and suggested a moratorium on mining until a strategic environmental assessment had been done. Because we feel that the government is flying completely blind. They’re approving all these applications ad hoc and when you look at the maps of where these things are, they’re all right next to each other or even on top of each other, and and they’re not taking into account the accumulative impacts of all of these things. If things carry on the way the they are then the coastline from at least Elands Bay all the way to Alexander Bay will be one big mining pit.

So yeah, the SEA should be commissioned by the government themselves, by the Minister of Environment or the DMRE. It’s not a small project — normally SEAs are done for a much smaller area. But we would encourage them to do one from all the way from Elands Bay all the way up to Alexander Bay and that’s a lot of money and takes a lot of time.

But yeah, we’ve encouraged them. We’re actually putting together a new letter for the new Minister of Environment. We’re going to be writing to him in the next two weeks. Again, just bringing his attention to what’s going on up there, and strongly suggesting the idea of an SEA.

The reality is that there are so many interested and affected parties on the coast that an SEA would really benefit, and if the government won’t get it done themselves, then potentially what we could do is just find the funding to initiate it ourselves.

And then, just get the government to agree to at least looking at it and using it as a tool to make informed decisions.

Katja: So why would it cost so much? What is involved?

Mike: It’s a lot of scientific data you’re looking at. So what an SEA really encompasses from my understanding, is it takes a look at how the West Coast should best be utilized from an economic perspective, from a social perspective, from a heritage perspective, and then also from an environmental perspective.

So if you could think of it like, mining in some areas is acceptable and can happen as long as it’s done legally and properly, and then you’ve got areas that are rich in biodiversity and that should be left untouched.

Katja: Because a lot of these areas where the plants are endemic and can’t be found anywhere else.

Mike: Yeah, there’s the golden mole up there that Leonardo DiCaprio posted about that is nowhere else — it lives on a 20 kilometer stretch of coastline. There’s plants up there, like you’ve alluded to, that don’t grow anywhere else in the world.

People think because it’s a semi arid, desert type of area that it’s barren. But it’s one of the richest, most biodiverse areas in the world.

Then there’s also agriculture, there’s tourism, there’s all these other factors that play a role. Those all need to be factored in and you need to go in there and collect all the data and do all this research. And it’s a big area, it’s a changing area, so it’s not all just copy and paste, so every area has got to be looked at individually and you’re probably looking at two years or so and ~10 million rand just to get that done properly.

Katja: That makes sense because it sounds like a really holistic overview.

Mike: Ja, and it’s the kind of thing that can be used for the next 50 years. So when you think about it in that context, and you think about all the people that it’s affecting and the environments that it’s affecting, then 10 million is nothing. 500,000 US dollars or something, it’s really doable.

Katja: And it’s something that maybe the mining companies themselves should be contributing to?

Mike: There is that too. Ja. But a lot of these mining houses are really, not B grade, but more like C grade mining operations. They’re there because they know they can get away with a lot. Mining legally and responsibly costs a lot of money, and a lot of these company don’t have that kind of money. So they’re here because they know that they can bribe government officials and they can get away with stuff and they don’t have to do what they say .

So what are some ways that readers can help with the West Coast? They can register as an interested party. Are there any other paths?

Mike: Look, yeah, it’s yeah when Ripl comes to life in the next couple of weeks people can register there. They can get involved that way. They can donate to our organization — the team that work at protect the West coast have been up until a few months ago doing this all pro bono and now they get paid a small stipend for their work.

But yeah, they can donate, they can engage with us on social media. If you’re a specialist or a scientist, as in geologists, marine biologists, etcetera, can always reach out to us and see how we can work together and collaborate. Then for the layman, really just sharing our stories and engaging where you can on social media. And if you’re a specialist in anything, a writer, journalist, whatever, you know helping tell our stories or your own stories, even, that’s great.

And then yeah, we sell merch on our website and all that kind of stuff. So if you want to support that way, that’s great too.

Tormin mining operation, by Jacque Smit

Katja: That’s great.

What is PTWCs biggest success story so far?

Mike: I think our biggest success story has been our media outreach, what we’ve done to highlight this plight, this issue. I think before we came into existence, it was probably a few thousand people that knew about it.

Katja: That even knew that it was happening at all.

Mike: Yeah. And then you’d probably go down to a few hundred, that actually saw the problem for what it is. Now many more people know, and I think that’s been our biggest achievement by a long way.

And then the court case, for sure, we settled out of court and we stopped TransHex from mining in the Olifants River Estuary.

We’re also doing a lot of work with various different organizations like Cape Nature and Sanparks, to get the Olifants River Estuary deemed a conservation area, because there are actually, I think, three or four mining applications in the Olifants River Estuary at the moment. They’re not mining, but prospecting, which leads to mining.

And then Ripl and our community engagement, we’ve created community around this and a platform for the affected communities — we’ve given them a voice, or giving them a voice, we’re in process. And it’s the first time ever. Over the years there’s been activists or individuals in the communities that have been trying to push back against what’s happening up there, but it’s always been ad hoc and one at a time and individual, and now we’re providing a unified voice which has been really great.

Katja: Yeah, that’s fantastic.

Mike: The other sort of agenda, I suppose you could call it, is that we want to encourage other industries, more modern industries that fall under the nature-based solutions umbrella. Like algae farming, kelp farming, perlemoen farming, all those kinds of things that are non extractive, they’re circular and they could have a very healthy home on the West Coast. They have the opportunity to employ so many community locals, with long term, sustainable jobs, not just for as long as the mine exists.

Katja: That would be amazing. Is there any current movement in that direction?

Mike: Yeah, there is, but in typical South African government style, the red tape surrounding these things is massive. We know of several international kelp farming organizations that have tried to set up shop here and that have actually left because they couldn’t get it right, from a red tape and legislative perspective.

We’ve also been engaging and partnering with an organization called CH4. They want to create algae from seaweed. And a perfect plant for them could be set up on the coastline in an old mining dump site or mining site. A small plant could produce at least a thousand full time jobs. And then the bigger plants could produce like 4,000 jobs. And that’s creating biofuel for the shipping industry, which is also amazing.

Katja: Then it’s non extractive and it’s contributing positively. Yeah, that sounds incredible.

Mike: It is! And honestly, there’s enough diamonds in the world now to service whoever wants them. And there are better solutions.

And rehabilitation — we could set up some rehabilitation projects on old mining sites up there that could reestablish the fauna and flora that was there, and create jobs for people.

Katja: There’s so much more that could be done. Are there any restoration projects currently?

Mike: No, we pitched one to De Beers last year and they just flatly said no. They strung us along for a few months, the initial reaction to our proposal was, yes, this sounds like something we could get involved with, sounds like a great initiative and would do a lot of good for the area. Then they sold their last mine, and it changed to ‘we’re done here now, we don’t have to do anything else, it’s somebody else’s problem’.

Katja: That’s disappointing. Okay, so no projects yet, but if Protect the West Coast got greater funding, then there’s so much that you can still do there.

Mike: Ja exactly. We really see our role as a facilitator. We have great community engagement and we’ve learned from the communities that we’ve engaged with, that they are really desperate, they are some of the poorest communities in the country. A lot of them can’t even fish for their living because of government intervention, and there’s not a lot of farming because these are arid areas. And ja, the mining industry has turned their back on these communities by and large. And so nature based solutions are the way of the future. All of these guys are crying out for it, the powers that be need to see it for what it is.

So that’s our project, it’s really to firstly tell the world that this needs to happen, and then try and facilitate as best we can.

The post Interview with Protect the West Coast CEO, Mike Schlebach appeared first on Wander Cape Town.

Interview with Danny Diliberto, CEO of Ladles of Love

Katja Mamacos — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 11:54:49 +0000

Ladles of Love is a non-profit organisation that feeds hundreds and thousands of disadvantaged individuals across Western Cape and Gauteng. They have established 160 soup kitchens and served just under 40 million meals since their inception and they aren’t slowly down anytime soon. Their feats are so incredible and inspiring that we had to learn more and share it for you here.

One of Wander Cape Town’s major goals is to learn and share some of the amazing projects happening in Cape Town and the people involved. So we sat down with Danny Diliberto, CEO of Ladles of Love, to talk about the organisation, it’s mission, where it started, where it is now, and how it came to be more than just a soup kitchen. I don’t want to spoil too much, so please enjoy the read!

What inspired you to start Ladles of Love? And how has it evolved since its inception?

Danny: So Ladles of Love was founded in 2014. It was founded on the basis of an ancient Sanskrit word, Seva. Spelled S E V A. Seva means giving of yourself, wanting nothing in return. But one needs to understand Seva. Seva is not even the joy that you get out of giving or just doing because you can. And that’s why that word resonated for me.

They teach you in church to give to get back. That’s not Seva. Seva is just giving. And then I had an interaction with a homeless man one day and being in the restaurant industry at the time, I was inspired to start a soup kitchen outside of my restaurant.

The restaurant was in the city with lots of homeless people and I had the kitchen so it was easy. No problem. And so I started my very first soup kitchen in July 2014, outside of my restaurant. And one soup kitchen became four soup kitchens. I just kept going. I knew when I started Ladles that it was a weird spiritual thing or whatever you want to call it. Religious, I don’t know.

I knew it was going to be more than one soup kitchen. It was just a godly gut feeling. And so one kitchen became four soup kitchens. I also found out kids were going to school hungry. That was around about 2015. So I started connecting with schools and helping them. One school became six schools. I was working with other soup kitchens that were feeding the homeless and I was providing them with either cooked food or the supplies to cook their own food so Ladles of Love was in those days doing around 15, 000 meals a month.

Then COVID hit. I remember I was listening to Cyril’s speech, that speech where we knew he was going to put us into lockdown. I remember how they were gradually putting us into lockdown and that night we knew.

It’s like I knew exactly what I had to do. I call them godly conversations. I knew I had to get to as many people as I could, as quickly as I could. I didn’t know where to get the money from, or how I was going to do it. I just knew I had to do it. And the one thing that Ladles has taught me is when you get those gut feelings, listen to them.

Don’t ask people’s opinions, which you get a lot of for free. And just take the first step. And that’s what I did the very next day, I just took the first step. And Ladles just exploded. We went from doing 15 000 a month to doing 200 000 meals a week in a matter of weeks. Like literally in a matter of weeks. We just started connecting with soup kitchens out in the communities.

And I was just using the model that I was trained to do. Life has a way of teaching us, you know? So I thought let me connect with soup kitchens and help them with food supplies. So I just put the word out. I said to the guys that I was working with, “Listen, if you’ve got a kitchen, and you can collect food, connect with me and I’ll help you”.

And you can imagine how it went crazy. My phone just lit up. People were just calling me, and I was going on references; before I knew it I had 150 soup kitchens, that we were supplying bulk food to and 50 tons of food a week out of our warehouse at CTRCC. That was my peak.

Justin: And this was during COVID?

Danny: This was during COVID in July. So between March and April, we went from like 100 kg a week to 50 tons a week

Justin * whispering *: Damn…

How do you manage to expand processes like that so that you can accommodate such a change?

Danny: You know when those godly conversations, whatever you want to call them, those gut feels, you’ve got to really just go with it. You’ve got to trust and focus on today. So whatever comes your way, deal with it and see where it takes you.

There’s no time to make decisions or anything like that. And that’s what I was doing. I was working day by day. We went from our little kitchen in Roeland Street and moved to CTICC. This was about three weeks into COVID. They gave us the entire Square Five, which was like 50 000 square meters.

And that’s where we just exploded because now we had the space. At the time, there was me and my cook that was employed at that time. Then we moved to CTICC and I realised I can’t rely on volunteers. So I just started talking to volunteers and they were out of work because business was shut down.

And I said, can you use a computer? They said yeah, I said, okay, just start collecting data. I just knew I had to collect data. When you perform Seva, I remember the teacher telling me this, two things will happen. You will always be provided for and as you grow, your shoulders will grow to take on the responsibility, and no one can argue that with me. Because Ladles has always been provided for, and this is what was happening.

Someone came to me and said I have a system that monitors food coming in and food going out, I said bring it. And I just needed people to fill the needs that presented themselves. The next thing I was employing 50 people. They were earning starters, they were earning like R7 000 a month or something. But 50 people from 2 people. I had no idea what I was doing, so I was just going day by day, and we had CTICC for 6 weeks.

People were saying to me Danny, what’s going to happen when the six weeks is over? I said I don’t know. I said I don’t know. And then the next thing, we moved into Grand West. Grand West gave us the entire exhibition hall, two and a half thousand square meters.

Justin: Wow…

Danny: They couldn’t use the exhibition hall. And they gave us three months at a time, and they just kept renewing because no one was allowed to do exhibitions and so we stayed there for a year and a half, you know. And where, where do you, you’ve now got different positions around the city.

So now you’ve expanded to different locations around the city?

Danny: We moved into this warehouse in Epping and as always, this landed on our lap literally the next day. The minute they gave us notice we had this. The landlord’s been amazing. He knocked like R 40 000 and off the rent. He doesn’t charge us levies. So this is our warehouse and this is where all our soup kitchens come and collect their food. So they come and collect the food and then they take it back. So we’ve been able to organically grow this distribution network into the communities through collection.

Do you have your own recipes and how do you ensure that all soup kitchens are doing the same kind of quality?

Danny: They all get the same vegetables like carrots, potatoes and butternuts as well as maize meal, rice, and samp. They also get oats, sugar, and salt, and they’ll take this back and cook with these items. And we’ll regularly check in and see how things are going and if they’re doing the work and that there is no funny business.

We have caught a couple and had to close them down or we just don’t supply them anymore. It’s the 80-20 rule. The majority of them are doing the work.

And what made you decide on this route for helping people? Why feed people?

You said that you were working in the restaurant industry. How did that play into where you are now?

Danny: At the time of COVID, food parcel was the big word and so I investigated these parcels and I noticed how bulky they were, how they were filled with junk, and they said this parcel could feed a family of four for a month and looking at this thing I realised there’s no way. There’s no way that this parcel that’s costing hundreds of rands can feed a family of four. And so it wasn’t making sense to me. And then I had a realisation. I said, “Hang on, why don’t I just use what I’m doing right now? Give them the food to cook. As long as they can come and fetch it, they can take it back and cook the meals that they want.

As long as you’re giving them the nutritious food, then they’re going to cook that food, right?

So that’s when I realised this is how we’re going to do it. That’s how we’ve managed to get so much food out into the community because my philosophy was that I’d rather serve a million people one meal a day than ten thousand people three meals a day. That was my philosophy.

So, I was strict with the guys. I said, “You can’t make food parcels out of this stuff. You’ve got to cook this food. It’s really important”.

And where do you source your veggies? Are they locally grown?

Danny: Yeah. They have to be.

Katja: They have to be?

Danny: Well, I mean, they, they’re carrots, potatoes, and butternuts. They’re within even the Western Cape.

Katja: Okay, fantastic.

Danny: So we work with commercial farmers because of the price. It’s bulk, the tonnage we need. We do work with community farmers as well. Their vegetables are of course a lot more expensive because of the scale.

But their vegetables are just so much more beautiful and so much more real. But that’s our sustainability project where we support the community farmers who are really an important part of the food ecosystem, the food chain.

We have a program called Feed the Soil and it’s about getting the farmers’ vegetables to market. And what we can’t sell, we give to our beneficiaries.

Katja: Right, fantastic. And where are those markets? Are there specific ones in Cape Town that people can support?

Danny: The Feed the Soil program has three purposes to it. The first one is to draw your food waste away from landfill because that’s a huge methane contributor. Rotting food waste creates methane.

So you’ve got places where people can bring their compost?

Danny: Yes, well their food waste.

Katja: Okay.

Danny: The second is that we take that food waste and convert it into compost, and third we give that compost for free to the community farmers and then we buy their vegetables. So that’s the three purposes of Feed the Soil.

It’s a bucket system that we created. A person buys and pays R200 for this bucket. You can get a small bucket or a big bucket. I won’t go into the process but once you fill your bucket, you can take it to one of our three depots around Cape Town: One in Sea Point, Constantia, and Vredehoek.

So those happen once a week when you bring your bucket on that day in your area, and you swap it. And that keeps the system going. We’re collecting over a ton of food waste a week so we have collaborated with Y Waste, who then convert it into compost for us. So for every ton that we give them, they give us 300 kilos of compost. Rich, nutritious compost, which we then give to our farmers. And then at our depots, we sell their vegetables.

Katja: Amazing. That’s a really good circular system.

Danny: The next phase of Feed the Soil is to grow the program, get others involved, and get more veg to market.

Katja: So bring them to restaurants?

Danny: Yeah.

Katja: Okay, fantastic! That would be amazing to see. And then they can see specifically on the menu that this supports local vegetable farmers.

Danny: Yes, exactly. Gorgeous George, the hotel in St. George’s Mall, is an upmarket hotel and restaurant, so their food cost can handle that price because it’s about three times more. But you see the ethos behind Gorgeous George, it’s not about the vegetable, it’s about supporting the community farmer. That’s the ethos. And that’s the people we need to look for, that we can connect with, that will buy it.

They still push you a bit on price, but they understand. But the quality is, I can’t even explain to you. When you bite a carrot, your tongue burns from the flavour of the carrot. It’s just, it’s just incredible. And it’s freshly harvested, you know. They harvest it on Monday morning and they deliver it Monday afternoon to us. It doesn’t get fresher than that.

Katja: Amazing.

So, at this point, how many do you roughly feed in a given month? How many people?

Danny: Currently, we’re at our lowest at the moment. We’ve dropped to about 20 tons of food a week.

Katja: And why is that?

Danny: Donations, cost of food. Okay. To give you an idea, rice has just shot up R2 a kilo. That for us is a 25 percent increase. And when you use two tons a week, you’re looking at roughly an extra R5000 a week just on rice. Vegetables fluctuate, but to give you an idea, my vegetables last week jumped up R17 000 rand in one week. So, it’s putting a lot of pressure on how much we can get out.

And donations are not flying in. The challenge with donations is you have to invest more money to get the donations. So now I need to employ a key accounts manager. The salary of that is not small but I need that person to go and connect with corporates now.

We need to get more corporate money. So I need to invest this salary that could go for six months without bringing in one cent. But hopefully, through creating a relationship, the money will start pouring in and we can start increasing our quantity.

So currently we’ve worked out we’re supporting around 35 000 people a day with food and we know the quantity of food that we need to feed a hundred people. So we’ve taken that recipe and entered it into our system and it generates the meal count according to that recipe. We are anywhere, depending on our output, between 150 000 – 200 000 meals a week that we are able to serve with the food that goes out.

Katja: Okay, fantastic. And so you’re expanding on your Corporate Social Responsibility program to try and get more South African companies involved.

Danny: Yes, so I’ve learned something very important called mindset. And what is mindset? Mindset is what you tell yourself. And how do you change your mindset? You change your mindset by changing the words in your head. So for example, charity. If I tell myself I’m a charity, that’s what I will be.

But if I want to create an impact, I need to see myself as a business. I need to change the mindset to run this organization like a business. I need to employ people. I can’t go to the landlord with a bag of lentils and say this is for the rent.

He’s gonna think I’m smoking something. So you’ve got to have that mindset, that business mindset if you want to create impact. We’ve got to spend money on social media, we’ve got a whole CRM system that costs us money every month. We talk through our emails monthly, I’ve got a communications manager that I need to pay a salary every month.

Hopefully, this gives you an idea of what I need to do to run this organization. Then last year, I remember I was sitting in one of our marketing meetings and I just, I just looked up with my team and I said, you know what guys, we don’t have donors anymore. I’m not going out with a begging bowl.

I said we’re changing our mindset. We are looking for stakeholders. People who want to walk a journey with us. They are our customers, and we treat them like our customers. So, we deal with them professionally, we respond quickly, and we work out ways that we can work together.

That’s really, really important to us. Our goal now is to create long-term relationships. Customers that will stay with us. That has been our guidance and our strategy. It’s great coming up with the idea, but the implementation gets tricky sometimes.

And we’re getting there now. That’s why we are now looking for a key account manager. That’s going to cost us a fortune every month that’s part of the strategy of creating stakeholders.

Katja: That’ll be interesting. I hope it goes really, really well because I do think the whole idea of corporate social responsibility is something to work towards. I can give you some SEO tips later!

Danny: But this mustn’t just be about the tick, about ticking the CSR box.

Katja: No, that is the problem with that kind of thing. Some businesses do it because it’s tax-deductible and because it’s part of the employee benefits package. I figure as long as it’s a tick for them, but then the employees who are participating in it are engaged then it’s still worth it.

Danny: Yes, and then hopefully with us, it’ll make it more real, come from a real place.

Katja: Wonderful.

So you’ve got quite a number of projects going on at the moment. What are you most excited about?

Danny: All of our projects. I’m passionate about all of our projects. We are primarily a food relief organisation but I have to say that our Feed the Soil program has sort of become my baby.

I love it because it’s about taking care of Mother Earth because if we don’t, who’s going to take care of her? It’s a little drop but I’ve always said at least do something. It’s about changing the mindset in the community, encouraging people not to throw their food waste away, and teaching people that when you throw food waste away, you’re wasting food.

You really are, even when you’re not going to eat it you are wasting food. So let’s not waste food. Let’s take care of our Mother Earth. So that is definitely my baby, but of course, I’m passionate about getting food out because food is a basic human right, and people shouldn’t have the choice whether they eat or not.

Katja: And proper nourishing food.

Danny:I mean, imagine you go home and you open your cupboard and there’s no food, and there’s no money in your bank. How scary is that?

Katja: No, it’s terrifying. I can’t imagine really. No, that’s wonderful. And I really love the sound of the Feed the Soil project. I imagine then they don’t use pesticides and herbicides and they’re just doing good.

Danny: Oh, it’s good. And I call it uncertified organic. Can’t get more organic than that. Really, you can’t.

Katja: Wonderful. Yeah, the whole certification is expensive.

Danny: Yeah, exactly.

Katja: So, uncertified organic is good as well. Yeah, that’s really wonderful.

So where would you still like to take the project? Is there any part of the vision that you haven’t achieved yet?

I know you said you were actually kind of going step by step, but it wasn’t all planned out at the beginning.

Danny: Yeah look, I drive my team mad. I drive business coaches mad because I believe I am a spirit-driven leader and wherever Ladles is today hasn’t been done by me.

It’s been done through me. I know what our why is, and that’s touching people’s lives in a positive way with love, dignity, and respect and as long as we’re doing that, then we are sailing our north star. And you know, do you ever reach north? You don’t. As long as you’re travelling towards our north star, as long as you’re sailing northwards, then you are achieving your why. And that’s how I’ve run Ladles of Love and everything that’s happened is what meant to happen. I believe we have to create impact and touch as many people as we can.

How big will Ladles get? I don’t know. But we will continue touching people’s lives, as many as we possibly can.

Katja: That’s wonderful. And it’s really lovely to chat with you and know that all of this is coming from a very good place because I think one gets a little bit cynical about NGOs sometimes and so it’s good to hear. It’s really good to hear and I’m excited to see where it goes!

Danny: Thank you.

Katja: I mean, it’s huge already.

Danny: Yeah, we launched Gauteng just over a year ago. They’ve just passed 1. 6 million meals that they’ve served. And now we’re going to launch Northern Cape. Five early childhood development centres we’re going to support.

I was serving the homeless in the city.

Katja: It’s expanded so much. Are you then working with other NGOs who run part of it? Or do you send someone out there to be the main person running it? Is this in Gauteng?

Danny: So in Gauteng, we opened another warehouse. It’s a much smaller version. We’ve got 21 beneficiaries there that we support. 21 soup kitchens. We’re hoping to launch Feed the Soil there as well. In the Northern Cape, I’ve connected with one of our beneficiaries and I’ve connected with a supplier. We will give the order to the supplier every week and they will deliver it. He’s got a place where they can deliver it. He will then break it up and distribute it to the five ECDs and I will pay the supplier.

Katja: Fantastic, alright.

Who or what inspired Cake Day?

Justin, that was one that you and Küra were curious to know.

Justin: Yeah, I’ve done a few volunteering days at the Hope Exchange. And I think once a week they do a cake day where they bake a cake and then serve that with the meals and so we were just curious because we heard it also from the people who were coming to collect meals. They were like, “Ah, yes! Cake Day!” And they all got stoked about it.

Danny: Honestly, I don’t know what inspired it because it wasn’t me. It was, it was my volunteers there. I think when it really started was when we got a donation. I think it was apples, like a huge donation and I said to the guys, “What are we going to do with all these apples? They’re going to go off.” I think they decided to cook them and then freeze them and we just thought why don’t we just make cake with it.

They just seem to enjoy cooking cake now, and it’s delicious every time I go, I’m stealing the cake.

Justin: *Starting to salivate* It’s really good.

Danny: Yeah. Ladles of love, when I started the soup kitchen, it was about serving healthy, nutritious, tasty, well-prepared food. Food that I’m going to serve my mother. I don’t care that you’re homeless. It doesn’t make you lower than me. You’re still a human being. So at the end of the day, you still deserve to eat a good bowl of food. And if my mother ain’t gonna eat it, you ain’t gonna eat it.

And then you bring in Didem, who’s my like head volunteer there. And she’s Turkish. Bring in a Mediterranean. She loves food. I will send cucumbers and lettuce and you’ll see the dish that they create, a pasta sauce with cucumber in it. And you taste it and you go, and she says, “I don’t know what I was doing, I just threw everything in and spiced it.” And you taste it and you go, “Wow, this is frickin nice.”

That’s what happens at the Dignity Kitchen, and that’s why we’ve called it Dignity Kitchen.

Katja: I really love that because when he first came back from his first volunteering, Justin said the food looked really good. I wanted some of that food. And that was really great to hear. Because I’ve done a food kitchen before and it was something I would never eat. And so it’s really cool to see someone doing it the way I would want it to be.

Danny: And I’m strict with my guy and I taste every time I’m there. And a couple of times I say to Paul “Taste this.” And he tasted it and he goes… So is it nice? And he goes, Hmm. I said, so why are you cooking it like this? And so he learned very quickly that he can’t cook crap.

Justin: Maybe a bit of a hard question, but if it does happen that the meal is subpar? Something that you wouldn’t wanna serve your mother. What would happen?

Danny: In our kitchen it would, it would only really be the flavour. The food is still fresh and it’s still nutritious. We’ll try and fix it up as much as we can if we can, but if it’s, if it’s too late, there’s not much you can do. You can’t not feed them much. You can’t throw it away, I mean I can throw it away, but…

Last question, how can individuals and businesses get involved and support the mission?

Danny: Website. Ladlesoflove.org.za. Go on there. Of course, money is always first. Like I said, I can’t go to the landlord with lentils and say “here, this is for the rent”. But sponsoring food and volunteering too. I realised this in the beginning when I was doing volunteering. I saw how people, strangers, were coming together in our soup kitchen and all of a sudden there was no gender, there was no religion, there was no colour. It was just human beings.

I just saw strangers come together and they’re smiling and they’re laughing. You’re working as a team and you’re just giving a bowl of food and I said “Wow this is like feeding the souls of our volunteers as well!” So I realised I needed to make volunteering as easy as possible as well and that’s been the essence. So we really try hard to create volunteering opportunities.

This week we launched our new volunteer calendar. Register as a volunteer on our website and you’ll get our weekly newsletter which keeps you updated because we’ve got campaigns going which often need volunteers. On Mandela Day we had 6, 000 volunteers.

Katja: That’s the one that you started with, Justin.

Justin: Yeah, that was the first one I did and we were cutting squares of material for the educational bean bags. And I think I cut somewhere close to maybe 500 squares or something like that. I decided to fold the material as many times as possible so I could make one cut and one cut and then I have a whole square.

Danny (finishing an earlier thought):

So go onto the website LadlesOfLove.org.za. You can donate there. You can sign up for our newsletter, and you can volunteer.

I saw you had an R250 monthly donation. That’s a good starting point.

Danny: Recurring donations are so good.

Katja: They’re always the best.

Danny: When you know you’ve got that money coming in every month, it’s like, okay.

Katja: Wonderful. Alright, I think that’s it.

Danny: Cool.

Katja: Thanks so much, Danny. I really appreciate it.

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