Conservation & Community
The operating philosophy
"If we bring the skills and experience from business to protecting the environment, we can make a real difference."
Conservation is not a footnote in Penny Streeter's businesses it is the operating philosophy. Every estate is held in active relationship with its landscape, its biodiversity, and the communities around it.
Conservation Partners
Protecting what exists
From medical staffing to one of the UK's most celebrated wine estates a vertical of ventures built on the same founding philosophy: solve a problem nobody else will, and never stop reinvesting.
WWF Conservation Champion
Cape Leopard Trust
Benguela Cove holds WWF Conservation Champion status for protecting the Cape Floral Kingdom and the Succulent Karoo two of the world's most biodiverse and threatened biomes. The Champion programme recognises producers who have aligned wine-growing with active habitat protection.
The estate works with the Cape Leopard Trust via a network of camera traps monitoring the elusive Cape mountain leopard South Africa's apex predator and a critical indicator species for the health of the Kogelberg Biosphere Reserve.
Michelin Green Star
Sustainable Wines of Great Britain
Restaurant Interlude at Leonardslee under chef Jean Delport holds a Michelin Green Star for its zero-waste, ethically-sourced seasonal cuisine. Ingredients are foraged and farmed within the gardens themselves, in a closed loop with the estate's ecosystem.
Leonardslee Family Vineyards is a Sustainable Wines of Great Britain member the national framework for low-impact viticulture, biodiversity preservation, and responsible producer practice across the UK.
iNaturalist
Hannuwa
Both Benguela Cove and Leonardslee practice hannuwa the ancient /Xam San philosophy of living in sustainable harmony with the natural world. Not a programme, but a posture: estates that exist with the land, not over it.
The UK's first golf and wine estate. 750 acres, two championship courses, and 38 acres of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier half of Leonardslee Family Vineyards.
“If we bring the skills and experience from business to protecting the environment, we can make a real difference.”
— Penny Streeter OBE · The Daily Mail
Community
The debt she repays
Having sat on a bean bag in a Croydon flat with two deckchairs and no furniture nine months pregnant with her third child, with two more under six Penny knows what homelessness looks like from the inside. In 2018 she became Patron of the Hermanus Night Shelter Association the shelter closest to her South African home at Benguela Cove.
She supports it through annual fundraising events, personal involvement, and platform: she has spoken about the experience of homelessness with unusual directness in The Sun, in the Sunday Times Magazine, to Rob Moore on the Disruptors podcast, and to audiences of entrepreneurs around the world because she believes the most useful thing a successful person can do is tell the truth about where they started.
The decision was not strategic. It was personal.
The philosophy
Hannuwa & the long view
The /Xam San — the first peoples of southern Africa knew the land in a way no extractive economy ever has. Hannuwa is their word for living within the rhythms of the natural world, not against them. It is the unspoken framework at Benguela Cove and Leonardslee: estates that exist with their landscapes, not over them. Beehives. Wallabies. Fynbos. Leopards. Wallabies and deer roaming. Foraged kitchens. Camera traps. Citizen science. Not a programme a posture.
The practice
Business as a tool for stewardship
The argument is simple, and Penny makes it directly: the same skills that build companies operational rigour, capital allocation, accountability, long-term planning are the same skills the environment needs. A business that runs profitably can fund conservation indefinitely; a charity that runs out of money cannot. The estates pay for the leopards, the leopards prove the ecosystem, the ecosystem makes the wine, and the wine pays for the leopards.
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200ha
Kogelberg
Biosphere protected -
240ac
Grade I Listed
UK gardens -
2018
Patron · Hermanus
Night Shelter -
3
Ecosystems
under stewardship