It all started with a simple question: Where do these materials go next?
The answer came together quickly to the teams designing and managing the booth materials at the company’s annual user conference, VMware Explore Barcelona 2023. At the event, the team designed captivating murals to adorn the exhibit halls.
The material used in the murals was waterproof and colorful, with imagery of plants and animals in jungles, oceans, deserts and cityscapes. Tiffany Hancher, a member of the team responsible for creating a welcoming environment for attendees, couldn’t let the materials just go to a landfill.
In fact, industry conference or trade shows generate an estimated 600,000 tons of trash annually in the U.S. alone, according to Trade Show Labs. An estimated 60 percent of the materials used in trade show booths end up in a landfill.
“The art was too beautiful to leave behind. Where does it go after this? We first thought maybe to a hospital where they need bright colors or maybe in a school where they might want new art on the walls.”
–Tiffany Hancher, Sr. Customer Loyalty Manager
Jessica Harris of InEvidence, a vendor supporting the event, is from South Africa and knew she could put them to use. “Send the materials to me in Cape Town,” she said, and the Colors of Hope project was born.
The team quickly pulled down the murals, packaged them and sent them to Cape Town. After a chance meeting at dinner, Jess met Alnerié Turck, executive director of The LifeMatters Foundation, a non-profit organization that runs libraries in and around Cape Town, among other programs for at-risk primary school students. Working together, the team identified four schools in Cape Town in dire need of some color and excitement for the students.
Cape Town can be a dangerous place for students. According to a study by Stats SA, the Western Cape recorded the highest percentage of children who were victims of attempted common robbery (55.2%), common assault (32.9%), and assault with grievous bodily harm (20.6%), among more serious crimes. According to Stats SA, children are also affected by crimes they experience or witness within their households, citing the Governance, Public Safety and Justice Survey which showed in 2022-2023, the prevailing crime among households with children was housebreaking and burglary (71.3%).
That’s why Janice Brown, Principal at Lourier Primary School starts her day at 5:00 am, driving to pick up students and bring them to school safely. “Every fourth or fifth child going home, it’s not safe. Because of what is happening in the area. At school there is structure. If they don’t come to school, they will be in the streets.”
The public schools struggle to get by with minimal funding. If there are surplus funds, that money is used to feed students; for some it is often their only meal of the day.
“The environment that we find ourselves in, we felt it needed to be vibrant,” said Jody Dawson, vice principal of Westlake Primary School. “It needed to be bright. It needed to catch the children’s attention. The children needed to be encouraged to come to school. It is easier for some to stay home. But we needed to make this a beacon of color. A little bit of color just makes a whole lot of difference. Sometimes their lives are without color, without love. And color just brings that love out in them.”
Made Possible by the Power of Community
Another chance meeting brought Morne Dourando to the project. He is the owner of a small business called Mr. Canvas. He builds frames, stretches materials, and creates canvases. He created the wall art from the Explore materials and worked with each school to hang them in hallways. “If you make school a happy place for kids, they will want to learn,” Dourando said.
The students were in awe of the bright colorful artwork that now adorned their school halls, cafeteria and classrooms. When they first saw the bright colors, the children screamed with joy and danced through the halls. Many of the children couldn’t believe that someone would do all this — shipping the materials, creating canvases, and handing them on the walls — just for them.
“For the children themselves, it is somebody else believing in them. Someone else believing in their potential,” Dawson said. “If someone else could come in here and share such great, beautiful art, what could our kids not create one day?”
Turck agreed: “Just knowing that somebody out there cares enough to put something beautiful in their schools. That kind of hope lasts much longer than the murals will or the book bags will.”
The artwork had an immediate effect on the students. “Having that paradigm shift from, ‘I’m coming here to work,’ to ‘I’m coming here to create,’ and the learners understand that I’m not coming to learn, I am part of the learning that takes place,” Principal Daniel Jansen of Steenberg Primary School said.
Driving Literacy with Book Bags
Broadcom also chose The LifeMatters Foundation for the Colors of Hope project because they run satellite libraries at each of the four chosen schools. The libraries offer reading support, math, literature, and counseling services for the students. A challenge facing the libraries was that the children could not take any books home to read because they had no means of carrying the books safely, keeping them clean and dry.
The team had local seamstresses take the tradeshow booth material and create book bags for all the students. Now they can take books home using their waterproof and durable book bags, which is contributing to literacy.
Colors of Hope Project Continues
At VMware Explore Las Vegas 2024, Broadcom will continue the Colors of Hope project, working with New Hope Girls, a non-profit organization in the Dominican Republic that rescues girls from human-trafficking and abuse, teaching them new skills and supporting their recovery. After Explore 2024, the booth materials will once again be saved and sent to New Hope for creating wall artwork, book bags, and more for at-risk primary school students around the world.
“The life that we’ve given to this art will be used for so many years; if we had never asked the question, it may never have happened.
–Tiffany Hancher, Sr. Customer Loyalty Manager