About Free State Projects

Free State Projects will be an umbrella orginisation working in a region of the Free State near Ficksburg and Fouriesburg. Its about bringing upliftment and development opportunities to communities through all of the avenues mentioned on this website. We are hands-on and can-do. We want to bring on board as many existing organisations to fulfil this idea so we do not re-invent the wheel. We will then look at what areas are not covered and seek to directly fill those gaps. So its development co-ordination as well as direct development work.

The idea is to create healthy communities by bringing a whole raft of ideas and practicalities to these communities and developing the best mix of them for each community. We are getting together volunteer networks and are looking to work with existing organisations and individuals on whatever terms they choose. We believe that working in partnership with us should be an opportunity for growth and development for the person helping as well as for the people they help.

The projects are about enabling people to live more fulfilling lives, helping self-sufficiency develop in the communities we help and generally creating livelihoods for the people involved. We seek to be an enabling framework for other things to hang from, so to speak.

The co-operative will buy land for livelihood creation and model community development purposes. It will also run the production facilities we setup. We want to create a "toolbox" community that will serve as a place that can then assist surrounding existing communities. The scope of assistance we are planning to be able to provide will be near total, from environmental restoration, agricultural projects and food supply to poverty alleviation, health care, child care, education and mental development, social structure development and arts and culture. All things to make a life.

So the goal is to bring a three pillar model of: permaculture inspired sustainable and eco-friendly industrial practice, human potential upliftment and development, and livelihood creation and enjoyment to a group of networked businesses and communities in the Free State province and South Africa to act as a model for businesses and impoverished communities in South Africa as a whole. We want to show various concepts and ideas in action and help promote their use in other upliftment projects in South Africa.

Most importantly, Free State Projects sees the end of grindstone-like industrial processes and ways of thinking as we go forward into this century. We are non-linear, dynamic and fluid and seek to create an ecology of interaction and co-operation that will produce a social and business framework able to sustain and nourish communities. We embrace working smarter, not harder.