The Future of Hope Foundation

The Future of Hope Foundation (TFoHF) is an organization headquartered in Zimbabwe and founded in 2013. Mission of the foundation is to capacitate, collaborate with, support and mentor marginal and vulnerable members of society through entrepreneurial and self-development initiatives. They facilitate research and training in innovative initiatives that provide for and promote sustainable food, nutrition, and income security to improve the conditions necessary for every member of society to reach their full potential.

Background

Inspired by the life experience of their founder Chido Govera who was an orphan and experienced many hardships including hunger and abuse but was able to turn her hardship into an empowering story. The ultimate goal of the Foundation is to end poverty, abuse, self-pity and victimhood, by enabling beneficiaries to step out of victim role and become change agents.

Starting in Zimbabwe and initially, with a specific focus on women and girl orphans, the organization is packaging programs and value models that can be replicable across the African continent and beyond, building on the local biodiversity.

Vision

Their Vision is of an inclusive world where there is Hope and a Future for all, a world without poverty, abuse, self-pity, and victimhood. They want a world where everyone can thrive, engage and reach their full potential in the betterment of humanity and nature. They envision a world where everyone can be a change agent, starting where they are, with what they have and regardless of their backgrounds.

Values

INTEGRITY: Upholding the virtues of honesty, trust, and confidence, ethical conduct, and truthfulness.
DIVERSITY: Acknowledging and celebrating our apparent differences as people, and the virtues of tolerance, respect, and inclusivity.
EXCELLENCE: Embracing best practices, doing our best, exhibiting a superior degree of competence and providing services of a high quality.
ACCOUNTABILITY: Upholding the virtues of transparency, discipline, acknowledging responsibility and our duty to serve our various stakeholders.
PROTECTION: Serving the vulnerable and the weak with the ultimate goal of and strengthening and empowering them to be independent and dignified beings.

Programs

Orphans Teach Orphans

Orphans Teach Orphans is a program focused on equipping young orphans so they help others. This program targets any out-of-school orphans, child-headed families and orphanages. They want to break the cycle of poverty in orphans and prepare them for safe adulthood to ensure that their offspring are not growing up in poverty and or as orphans.

Mentors and Grandmothers

This program mobilizes community young women and grandmothers and equips them with skills to help taking care of orphans and vulnerable groups and midwives (enablers of change) of the overall communities. Through this program, they want to reactivate the strong sense of community's responsibility in raising children and taking care of the weak, the spirit of UBUNTU and a safe and inclusive space for the manifestation of hopes and dreams of all.

Sustainably Feeding Ourselves

Feeding Ourselves is a program aimed at equipping people with the skills to go beyond just the right to food to sustainably feeding themselves with quality, healthy and nutritious food. The program comprises an exploration of sourcing/production and processing/preparation of food practices that are most ideal and sustainable in view of the challenges that face our world today. Through this program, they want to redefine waste, food production processes, how and what people eat.

Nature & Farm to Market

This program is focused on responsibly gathering from nature's abundance and sustainably farming produce and processing products for the market. Generating value is key in convincing people to be good custodians of their local biodiversity. Through this program, and in collaboration with some of the best influencers in food from across the globe, they want to champion best practices for sustainably generating value from nature and farms and creating market linkages to benefit overall ecosystem of the communities they work in.

To make this program strong and more meaningful, HOPEFOOD Pvt Ltd was created to facilitate market linkages for all produce coming out of this program.

Value Model

The Integrated Food Production System (IFPS)

The Mushroom and Poultry based Integrated Food Production System (IFPS) is based on Mushroom Production from agro-biomass and rearing of the Planetary Community Chickens (PCC) which enables the recycling of nutrients to create more value in form of animal feed and fertilizer for crops.

Why Mushrooms?

Mushrooms belong to one of the most interesting kingdoms of nature, the fungi kingdom that modern day science continues to highly embrace and appreciate beyond just the tasty and nutritious edible mushrooms but for its power to replenish the natural biodiversity of soils and even cleaning contaminated water. In this day and age, it is impossible to build a resilient environment, food, and nutrition system without looking to mushrooms given the harsh environmental conditions and the complete depletion of soils due to use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides that hinder traditional food production.

Why specifically PCC?

Modern poultry flocks have become genetically impoverished due to industrialized farming and are at considerable risk of diseases. The PCC comes out of an artistic-philosophical crossbreeding work by Belgian artist Koen Vanmechelen. A continuous crossbreeding of chicken species in the Cosmopolitan Chicken Project (CCP), has resulted in the birth of chickens that show a remarkably higher genetic diversity.

Typically, every household maintains a flock on chickens in the areas where they work. The flocks are much threatened by diseases and slow growth due to inbreeding. In view of these challenges in their target areas, the PCC presents an opportunity as the breed easily adapts and thrives in different environmental conditions due to its vitality. The PCC counters genetic erosion of modern breeding systems by coupling the local Road Runner and Layers Chicken species to the CCP. The Road Runner and Layers chicken absorb the diverse genetic pool of the CCP rooster and produce a vital community chicken that can provide its host community with both eggs and meat more efficiently - building on what already works locally!