Swim Smart Kids

My name is Rene Donenberg and I’m reaching out from Swim Smart Kids: Empowering Kids with Water Safety, my passion project that I’ve created, to get our “unswimmable” pool fixed and functioning.

I’m a teacher at Johannesburg Girls Preparatory School in Berea Johannesburg- it’s the oldest school in Johannesburg and we have the only swimming pool in the inner city. 

I strongly believe that children need to learn the life skill of swimming, knowing that they can drown in a few centimetres of water. With our pool fixed, we could reach out to the surrounding schools and help so many more children and teach this all important life skill. Our girls are desperate to learn how to swim and it would be my dream to make this a reality for them. 

We have over 1100 girls attending the school daily. Many of our moms came here- mine did and so did my husbands. Most of our parents are unable to pay our school fees and we were without electricity for almost a year- it has just been reconnected. We have very limited resources but we do the best we can with what we have. W...