Siyakhula Trust (Johannesburg, South Africa)
Laura Baron at the course taught at Hapy D Daycare in Soweto |
I've spent my summer volunteering for the Siyakhula Trust in Johannesburg, South Africa. The mandate of the Trust is to assist nonprofit and community organizations so they may more effectively carry out their various initiatives. As such the focus of the organization's work is to provide education and training to developing communities, as well as advisory services in a legal, technical and organizational capacity to national institutions, apex bodies, NPOs and CBOs. Some of the initiatives that have been ongoing since I have been here include a management training course at a community centre in Alexandra Township, a fundraising workshop at a daycare in Soweto, and an organizational audit of a high school in Diepsloot Township.
Although I have had the opportunity to work on some of these projects, my time with Siyakhula has been largely dedicated to two initiatives slated to begin in September. In the first, the Trust will be working with five home-based HIV/AIDs-care NPOs in the North West and Limpopo provinces. The second involves working with twenty-five CBOs across rural South Africa that focus on supplying food for indigent peoples. The main objective of the projects is to help these small organizations become sustainable, accountable and more efficient in terms of the services they deliver to their respective communities.
My project has been to write a manual that will enable the organizations to become 'legal': to register themselves as NPOs with the government, create their founding documents, become eligible for tax exemptions and donor deductible status, and comply with ongoing regulatory requirements such as financial reporting.
Although at several points during the last few months I felt a bit buried by the wooly bureaucracy of South African government, now that the manual is nearly complete I feel a great sense of accomplishment because I know it's going to be of great use to a lot of people doing really excellent work.
Overall, working and living in Johannesburg has probably been as much of a learning experience as my actual internship. South Africa is still very much a country in transition, extreme poverty is incredibly proximate to privilege, racism is shockingly widespread, and violent crime is ubiquitous. Although the government has made impressive inroads to reverse the legacy of apartheid and address the widespread poverty and unemployment of the population, there is still an overwhelmingly long way to go, which national scourges such as AIDs and crime only exacerbate. It has been discouraging to realize that more than ten years after the end of apartheid, in a wealthy country with even greater economic potential, there are still basic needs that go unmet for masses of the population.
While it is rewarding to be able to offer a small but palpable contribution to the Trust, there are several steps that still need to be taken on a much larger scale before the majority of the people in South Africa can feel real change. I will be interested to see how the country's major problems are addressed in the years leading up to 2010, and hope to stay involved in the process through Siyakhula.
Laura Baron with kids and staff at the Hapy D daycare in Soweto. Hapy D focuses on caring for HIV/AIDs orphans
