Welcome to the Hope of the Valley Trust website. The vision we bring into the educational space in the Ocean View Valley is based on four concepts. Firstly, our project is alive with possibility, and anything can happen to enhance the way we strive to deliver a quality education to all our pupils in our newly planned three-stream dream high school called Hope of the Valley based in Ocean View, overlooking the world-renowned Chapman’s Peak Mountain Pass with its amazing views onto the neighbouring Hout Bay harbour.
The Zanders state: “Unimpeded on a daily basis by the concern for survival, free from the generalized assumption of scarcity, a person stands in the great space of possibility in a posture of openness, with an unfettered imagination for what can be.”
We at Hope of the Valley believe that through our daily contact with other schools and business partners, we can achieve great things by thinking positively together within a frame of reference of abundance. When we consider the possibility that there is enough of everything for all role players, we can not only make things happen at our school but also at other schools, bringing tremendous joy to our business partners as well. We therefore collapse our fences here at our school, and we look at the broader picture of how we form a vital and much-needed part of the greater valley community, where we do not operate in a silo focussed selfishly only on our needs and wants but also on those of others at partner schools. We have in our hands and minds the possibility of creating new ideas, contributing in any small or big way to a project, and constantly striving to improve the relationship between people at our school and partner schools, service providers and business partners.
Peter Block introduces the concept that all children in South Africa are our children. We will not only do things to benefit children at our school but also at other schools when the opportunity arises. We will work closely with all the other schools in the valley, namely Ocean View High, Masiphumelele High, Jupiter Street Primary, Kleinberg Primary, Kommetjie Primary, Marine Primary, the local Elsen special-needs school, and Ukhanyo Primary.
Secondly, we see ourselves as a strength-based organisation vs. a deficient-thinking model. We see ourselves as a community school, so we must focus on our gifts, not our deficiencies. Gifts create possibility and abundance-thinking, whereas deficiencies create problems and scarcity-thinking. An abundance mentality or way of thinking is selfless and believes that there is plenty out there and enough to spare for everybody, that each one can get a slice of the cake, whereas a scarcity mentality is selfish and self-centred and people who think like this have a very difficult time sharing their gifts and talents with others because they think that they must always grab the biggest slice of the cake because we live in a dog-eat-dog world.
As Peter Block states, “Citizens in a community want to know what you can do, not what you can’t do.” Also, through the sharing of gifts, we want to bring parents who see themselves as on the edge of our community circle into the centre, where they will see that they do matter and that they do have something to contribute.
Thirdly, our language is one of citizenship vs. consumerism. Each teacher, support staff member, pupil, parent, and business partner is a citizen in the HoTV School community and has something to contribute. A citizen asks, “How can I help? How can I contribute financially or with my gifts?” A consumer constantly asks, “What can you do for me? What can you give me? What is in it for me? What can I get out of this?”
Fourthly, to everyone involved in our project: we have the power to act. We cannot wait for Superman to come and save us; we have the ability to do so ourselves. Sustainability is the ability of all the people in the community to be accountable and responsible for carrying projects forward. So, we must step up to the plate and do our very best; we must believe in ourselves; we must make the dream a reality one small step at a time. We must move away from victim mentality to victor mentality. While our apartheid past is there, we must use this story to rewrite a new one of possibility which can propel us forward to greatness and connectedness.
My inspiration comes from three books:
Block, P. (2008) Community, The Structure of Belonging. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
Covey, S.R. (1989) The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. London: Simon & Schuster Ltd.
Zander, R.S. and Zander, B. (2000) The Art of Possibility. New York: Penguin Books
