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Last week I sat with a few illustrious South Africans including businesswoman, SAA Board member and former activist, Cheryl Carolus, her husband, education specialist, Graham Bloch, HCI chief executive Johnny Copelyn, and emeritus professor at the University of Cape Town, Francis Wilson to name five of the 11-member panel.
As judges for the Impumelelo Innovations Award Trust, run by executive director, the formidable Rhoda Kadalie, we sat for two days utterly gob-smacked, humbled and hugely excited by what ordinary South Africans are achieving in this country. And let me tell you, it takes a lot to move an experienced, seasoned bunch of hardcore judges.
It is at times like these that I really love my job as a journalist. The Impumelelo Awards are my annual shot in the arm, my window on a world that functions and happens uncelebrated and far away from public view.
It is a world, you must believe me, where South Africans are undertaking extraordinary initiatives, both private and public, many of them excellent, innovative and groundbreaking, in an attempt to fix some of the historical and contemporary crises we face.
From turning landfill sites into bird sanctuaries or converting the gas from garbage to electricity, from teaching children in remote areas how to read to reducing seriously the rate of HIV infection from mother to child, what’s going on out there is, to say the least, awesome.
This is my second year on the judging panel and in our discussions afterwards the judges all remarked on how we had been struck by the fact that ordinary citizens were no longer looking to or expecting government to find solutions to a host of problems, some massive and others more discreet.
We all agreed that we needed to find ways to bring wider exposure for the miracles we witnessed and that so energized us, we kept communicating by round-robin emails for days afterwards.
You, dear reader, are viewing the world through the small, smudged and limited window that mainstream media offers you.
There are too many projects for me to mention in detail here but I will offer some of those that are making a huge difference in the lives of those who initiated and benefit from the work.
Harvest Of Hope is one of them. This is a collective of unemployed women in Cape Town who farm vacant land in townships and along highways. Not only do they feed their own families on the delicious organic vegetables but they have also expanded the initiative so that the small farmers now sell to homes in and around Cape Town. If you want to be inspired go to http://harvestofhope.co.za/
We all know that the unemployment figures for youth between 18 and 25 are horrific. The Etafeni Day Care Centre Trust not only offers pre-school facilities to the residents of Nyanga where 28 percent of residents is HIV positive, a food garden but also an intensive 12 month unemployed school leavers training course that has seen over 80 percent of the some 240 trainees who have benefitted from the course in permanent employment. The course teaches youth who have no idea of what is expected in the workplace, how to manage expectations and demands. It also encourages personal responsibility and builds self-esteem, issues that are often lacking in impoverished communities.
One of our favourite projects was one that took place in four regions in the Eastern Cape and that will change the lives of almost 4000 girls aged between 12 and 15, an age group that has the highest dropout rate in schools.
An NGO, the Small Projects Foundation (SPF), did research and found that girls were dropping out of school because of the problems of puberty and especially the onset of menstruation. The SPF and the local Department of Education discovered girls were losing a week a month because of their periods, the unavailability of sanitary towels and the fact that toilets at all of the schools were unusable, unsafe and filthy. The number of days off began to impact on the girls’ ability to keep up and many just dropped out.
The solution. Proctor and Gamble provided R3.2 million for the project including basic education on reproductive health and the donation of free sanitary towels. The toilets at all the school were cleaned, fixed and upgraded to offer the girls privacy (and the money for this was already factored into the school budget but just not used.)
The effect on the girls’ lives (and those of their families) was dramatic. The girls not only now understood the nature of their changing bodies but it also helped them to begin to negotiate and understand sex.
For a national pick-me-up visit the Impumelelo website at http://www.impumelelo.org.za/
Do you think ordinary South Africans are making a difference?
As judges for the Impumelelo Innovations Award Trust, run by executive director, the formidable Rhoda Kadalie, we sat for two days utterly gob-smacked, humbled and hugely excited by what ordinary South Africans are achieving in this country. And let me tell you, it takes a lot to move an experienced, seasoned bunch of hardcore judges.
It is at times like these that I really love my job as a journalist. The Impumelelo Awards are my annual shot in the arm, my window on a world that functions and happens uncelebrated and far away from public view.
It is a world, you must believe me, where South Africans are undertaking extraordinary initiatives, both private and public, many of them excellent, innovative and groundbreaking, in an attempt to fix some of the historical and contemporary crises we face.
From turning landfill sites into bird sanctuaries or converting the gas from garbage to electricity, from teaching children in remote areas how to read to reducing seriously the rate of HIV infection from mother to child, what’s going on out there is, to say the least, awesome.
This is my second year on the judging panel and in our discussions afterwards the judges all remarked on how we had been struck by the fact that ordinary citizens were no longer looking to or expecting government to find solutions to a host of problems, some massive and others more discreet.
We all agreed that we needed to find ways to bring wider exposure for the miracles we witnessed and that so energized us, we kept communicating by round-robin emails for days afterwards.
You, dear reader, are viewing the world through the small, smudged and limited window that mainstream media offers you.
There are too many projects for me to mention in detail here but I will offer some of those that are making a huge difference in the lives of those who initiated and benefit from the work.
Harvest Of Hope is one of them. This is a collective of unemployed women in Cape Town who farm vacant land in townships and along highways. Not only do they feed their own families on the delicious organic vegetables but they have also expanded the initiative so that the small farmers now sell to homes in and around Cape Town. If you want to be inspired go to http://harvestofhope.co.za/
We all know that the unemployment figures for youth between 18 and 25 are horrific. The Etafeni Day Care Centre Trust not only offers pre-school facilities to the residents of Nyanga where 28 percent of residents is HIV positive, a food garden but also an intensive 12 month unemployed school leavers training course that has seen over 80 percent of the some 240 trainees who have benefitted from the course in permanent employment. The course teaches youth who have no idea of what is expected in the workplace, how to manage expectations and demands. It also encourages personal responsibility and builds self-esteem, issues that are often lacking in impoverished communities.
One of our favourite projects was one that took place in four regions in the Eastern Cape and that will change the lives of almost 4000 girls aged between 12 and 15, an age group that has the highest dropout rate in schools.
An NGO, the Small Projects Foundation (SPF), did research and found that girls were dropping out of school because of the problems of puberty and especially the onset of menstruation. The SPF and the local Department of Education discovered girls were losing a week a month because of their periods, the unavailability of sanitary towels and the fact that toilets at all of the schools were unusable, unsafe and filthy. The number of days off began to impact on the girls’ ability to keep up and many just dropped out.
The solution. Proctor and Gamble provided R3.2 million for the project including basic education on reproductive health and the donation of free sanitary towels. The toilets at all the school were cleaned, fixed and upgraded to offer the girls privacy (and the money for this was already factored into the school budget but just not used.)
The effect on the girls’ lives (and those of their families) was dramatic. The girls not only now understood the nature of their changing bodies but it also helped them to begin to negotiate and understand sex.
For a national pick-me-up visit the Impumelelo website at http://www.impumelelo.org.za/
Do you think ordinary South Africans are making a difference?
