Giving Back

  • CORPORATE SOCIAL INVESTMENT
  • GREEN INITIATIVES
  • OUR PARTNERS

Education is a basic need and lifelong learning and growth is what builds a healthy nation and economy.

Foster-Melliar is passionate about education and gives back to the community through our knowledge and access to education. Foster-Melliar currently has two programs in place to support and assist impoverished and previously disadvantaged communities.

School Feeding Scheme
Foster-Melliar supports the Peninsula School Feeding Association in the Western Cape. The Peninsula School Feeding Association (PSFA), a registered Non-Profit Organisation, was established in 1958 when the government at the time discontinued the national school feeding programme.

For more than 50 years, PSFA has been providing meals to hungry children in primary, secondary and special-needs schools across the Western Cape, including the distant rural areas.

Foster-Melliar shares the motto of the PSFP which is: “You can’t teach a hungry child”. Foster-Melliar is looking to extend our involvement in school feeding schemes to Gauteng and the rest of Mzanzi in the near future.

Bursaries and adult education
Foster-Melliar, together with its’ partners has put together two separate ways to assist with education the community, and most importantly make people more employable.

Our bursary programme is designed for school leavers seeking employment. These are individuals who can either not afford tertiary education or did not achieve a university entrance. Typically lower income earners from rural or previously disadvantaged areas.                                                                                       

There are six bursaries to choose from, each focussing on a specific learner outcome or job skill. All the bursaries have been subsidised by Foster-Melliar and our partners, and the successful candidate pays less than 1 third of the market price.

The bursary programmes run for six months at a time, and during the six months learners are taught specific skills that are applicable to a particular job or line of work. In addition to this, every learner, no matter which educational vocational track they have chosen will be taught critical life skills such as, Effective Reading, Business Writing and Presentation Skills.
The programmes current on offer are:

  • IT/Network technician
  • Graphic designer
  • Business / office administration
  • Personal Assistant / Secretarial
  • Book keeping / Accounts
  • Marketing assistant / coordinator

Foster-Melliar also offers an adult learning programme that focuses on teaching PC skills to people who have never been exposed to or worked on computers. This programme is called the End User Computing Programme (EUC), and is a shortened powerful programme that teaches the basics of PCs, the Operating systems, and Office applications.

This programme has also been subsidised and successful candidates are expected to pay only one quarter of the market related price.

On this programme learners are taught:

  • Computer Basics
  • Keyboard and Mouse
  • Windows Basics
  • Excel (beginner and intermediate)
  • Word (beginner and intermediate)
  • PowerPoint (beginner and intermediate)
  • Outlook and email (beginner and intermediate)

Foster-Melliar recognises the impact that the training industry has on the environment, especially with regards to paper consumption for teaching aids (books/manuals) and the knock on effect on water and paper pulp consumption and ultimately deforestation.

Foster-Melliar endeavours to use as little paper as possible in our quest to teach and educate. Some of the initiatives that are already in place are:
•    Recycling of water receptacles used in the training venues
•    Recycling of any paper and paper products
•    Supplying course material on CD
•    Supplying brochures electronically
•    Using e-Readers like Sony and AmazonKindle to read course material
•    Making use of virtual PC environments to reduce energy consumption
•    Making blankets available to learners in winter to reduce heating requirements
•    Consciously not using Data projectors or Air conditioners unless absolutely necessary

We are constantly looking for innovative ways of reducing Foster-Melliar’s impact on the environment.

  • Global Continuity
  • North Star Solutions
  • The Learning Revolution
  • Xynamix Training & Consulting