South African Grant Recipient Visits Franciscan Sisters Who Awarded Grant

5/18/06
year: 
2006

Aston, PA—On Tuesday, May 23, 2006, Pam Mfaxa, Executive Director of the Pastoral Center Preschool and Créche in Soweto, South Africa, will visit the Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia at Our Lady of Angels Convent, the congregation’s motherhouse in Aston, Pennsylvania. Earlier in 2006, the Sisters of St. Francis awarded Mrs. Mfaxa a Social Justice Grant to help finance the trip which is part of a networking/fundraising effort to expand the Pastoral Center’s childcare services.

The Pastoral Preschool and Créche is located in the Kliptown squatter camp community whose residents are among the most impoverished in the country. In 2004, with assistance from the Reinvest South Africa Charitable Trust (RISA), a U.S.-based nonprofit organization, Mrs. Mfaxa was educated to manage a daycare center and to upgrade her business/management skills to enable the daycare to create a more sustainable future for itself. This current trip will provide Mrs. Mfaxa with a dual opportunity:

  • To share the story of the créche with potential donors

  • To network and learn from peers working in the childcare field in the U.S.

The childcare center, which started thirteen years ago with six children, now has an enrollment of 168. Many of the children enrolled are fom “vulnerable” families. In many cases the children have no parents or have parents who are dying with AIDS. Mrs. Mfaxa also runs support groups and income generating projects for HIV+ and/or unemployed parents and community members.

Sister Nora Nash, Director of Corporate Social Responsibility for the Sisters of St. Francis, said that “it is a joy to know that our Social Justice Grant money is reaching those who are poor all over the world.” Mrs. Mfaxa will be accompanied on this trip by RISA’s Elena Pullen-Venema.  In addition to the visit to Our Lady of Angels Convent, they will also be visiting Neumann College in Aston, Tufts University , Harvard University, and Leslie College.

Visit our website, www.osfphila.org, to learn more about the congregation’s work with Corporate Social Responsibility.