Jane Hardy, based in the UK, is an extreme cold water swimmer, and was the first English woman to swim an ice kilometre in Antarctica in February 2020.
Jane swam the Freedom Swim, a mass participation event that takes place from Robben Island to the Cape Town mainland in 2015 where she met Arafat Gatabazi, a Breadline Africa ambassador who reconnected her with Breadline Africa director, Marion Wagner after 25 years, as it turned out that they had attended university together!
Jane took the opportunity to learn more about Breadline Africa’s work, and was so impressed with the difference the organisation was making to children in under-resourced communities, that she took it upon herself to actively raise funds. Together with Arafat, she swam around the moat in the Castle of Good Hope to celebrate its 250th birthday, while raising awareness and funding for Breadline Africa and also arranged events in the UK – included sitting in an ice bath outside her local Sainsburys supermarket for Sport Relief, a fundraising arm of Comic Relief, a UK-based international funding entity. The store kindly gifted a range of basic necessities, which Jane brought on her next visit to South Africa to be distributed to one of Breadline Africa’s pre-school projects in Khayelitsha, Cape Town.
Jane’s involvement in making the world a better place is not limited to Breadline Africa and she lends her time and efforts to several environmental causes, with a strong emphasis on protecting the oceans. She rescues marine mammals for British Divers Marine Life Rescue and is involved with Pawz for Thought, a domestic animal rescue organisation.
