Tenikwa hosts a conservation program which is aimed at grassroots level;  to work with the children of our communities to question accepted practices and customs, to raise awareness about habitat loss, the impact of environmentally insensitive farming practices and what each one of us can do to preserve our wildlife.

If we cultivate a sense of empathy in our children, like a seed it will grow, until as an adult, other options to killing will be explored.  For some species it will be too late, but we are the last generation who can make a difference.

We realized, over time, that when working with disadvantaged communities we were pitching our awareness programme at too high a level.  Subsequently, we have started to look at fundamental issues, such as care of animals in township situations.  If children are taught to respect and care for their pets, to gain personal satisfaction and growth from owning a happy and heathy pet, we believe that this is the very first step to opening the awareness of wild animals and their role beyond a source of food.  This is why we initiated the regular animal care clinics, the sterilisation clinics, and more recently the healthy pet competitions in Kurland Village.

Tenikwa Wildlife Awareness Centre encourages members of our local communities to come through the centre and learn about South African wildlife and our environment.  One of our objectives is to run a community outreach program which educates local disadvantaged communities and our farming communities about the importance of preserving wildlife in the area.  We do this through talks and presentations to various groups, invitation to groups to visit Tenikwa, publishing articles and information in newspapers and media, printed material available at the centre, provoking a thought process during the tour and having information available on the web which people can assimilate in a non-threatening way.

When we started our Rehabilitation Centre we realized that through rehabilitation we can make a difference to the lives of individual animals and certainly in the penguin case, a difference to the species, but through education and awareness we really have the ability to impact on a much greater scale and we have focused much of our efforts in the last two years on this area.

Although we do presentations at schools and clubs, we really like to take people into the natural habitat of the animal, to make the connection between the survival of the animal and the preservation of natural habitat and therefore it is important to bring the people to Tenikwa as it has far greater impact than doing a talk in a school room, for example.