Geordie Ratcliffe has a PhD (zoology) in aspects of freshwater ecology with more than 20 years’ experience in river and wetland management. She is the interim programme director for the Routes to Resilience education programme. She has lectured to undergraduate and postgraduate courses, supervised theses and written over 50 papers, reports and reviews. She taught as an intermediate phase teacher at a government primary school in the previously designated Coloured township of Silvertown. Noticing how deep social deprivations were reflected in low levels of literacy among parents and their children and how the constraints on parental involvement in the lives of their children made the task facing educators even more difficult, she initiated and is leading – in a collaboration between the Impact Trust and the University of Cape Town’s School of Education – the ALERT project seeks to better support the development of teacher practice and curriculum design in a way that would engage the most marginalised youth in their education.