The Spring Foundation - Lentegeur

The Spring Foundation - Lentegeur is rated 3 out of 5 in the category mental health care. Read and write reviews about The Spring Foundation - Lentegeur. The Spring Foundation is a registered NPO and PBO which focuses on using innovative approaches to showcase Lentegeur Psychiatric Hospital in Mitchell's Plain, Cape Town (South Africa) as a leading, community focused, mental health centre that, through its unique programmes, brings to life the regenerative nature of Spring within the people who are in the hospital and the surrounding community. Translated, the word Lentegeur means: “the aroma of spring” and the purpose of the Spring Foundation is to reinvent what a psychiatric hospital looks like, feels like, is and does by using ecological principles to bring alive the metaphor inherent in the name Lentegeur. This is being done through a hospital greening project to minimise carbon and water footprints, a radical transformation of the hospital’s landscape into a place of beauty, the development of a Recovery project and of pro-environmental rehabilitation programs such as permaculture development and a program of cultural revival that re-establishes a sense of community and of connection to the soil. The underlying philosophy of the Spring Foundation is about the rebirth of hope through re-connection. This re-connection can be understood in a number of ways: • Between individuals and a sense of meaning and purpose in their own lives • Between individuals and society • Between different social groups in our divided nation • Between humans and nature • Between those alive today and our roots in heritage and culture When we make these connections, there is a shift beyond the absolute, categorical way we habitually see ourselves, as sick or healthy, as crazy or normal, as me or you, us or them, now or forever. We start to realise we are not stuck and we are not alone. When this starts to happen, we begin to understand that there is hope and when we have hope, we become alive to possibility!