Hurtwood parents recently raised over £5000 in sponsoring Ted Jackson’s North Pole Marathon and the Trust continues to thrive.Zoë was a student at Hurtwood House and the trust was set up in her name after she tragically died in 1996. Hurtwood has worked closely with the trust and in 2004 helped fund two “edutainer classrooms” for the poorest of poor children in the township ghettoes of South Africa.
South Africa continues to attract the bulk of their spending, about 60%, followed by Kenya and Uganda 20%, Nepal 15%, and Sierra Leone 5% this year.The nature of their projects is becoming more diverse, covering not only Edutainers (where they are concentrating now on rural areas where they have a massive impact), but also primary and pre-school (ECD) grass-roots buildings and extensions, teacher training, vocational training for students, and financing experimental teaching methods (currently in process with considerable success in Uganda). They often have to provide some operational support to new schools in the early stages.
There is no let up in requests for new funding, and they already have commitments or proposals which will take them well into 2009, when they will probably spend about the same as this year.
So, they will have plenty to do! The Trust has now spent well over £1 million in its eleven years. Zoë would be amazed to find her name on over thirty schools spread across Africa and bits of Asia.