The DGMT Learning Lunch

Inequality of opportunity means that every child does not start their life with the same chances. Inherited circumstances such as race, gender, socioeconomic status and place of birth affect their likelihood for upward income and social mobility. A growing body of research is telling us that people’s social connections predict mobility. Harvard researchers have mapped the childhood roots of upward...

Young people make up a third of South Africa’s population and are a key demographic for social, economic and political change. According to South Africa’s National Youth Policy, as well as its National Youth Commission Act (1996), the demographic of ‘youth’ is anybody between the ages of 14 and 35 years. As a category of analysis, this demographic is far from homogenous, yet young people are often...

In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, social employment emerged as one of the levers that could stimulate the country’s economic recovery. As part of a host of publicly funded interventions, the South African government sought to centre and support the work already being done by civil society organisations to enable community-driven solutions to local problems through a Social Employment Fund (SEF...

Doing voluntary work carries several benefits for the volunteers themselves, for the organisation hosting them, and for prospective employers. Volunteer work can help young people to gain work experience and explore their passions and strengths. If they volunteer in civil society, they learn about some of the country’s most pressing social issues. There is also a business case to be made for compa...

In South Africa, young people continue to be disadvantaged in a labour market where the youth unemployment rate is higher than the national average. In increasingly tough times, unemployment statistics paint a bleak picture. Unfortunately, and counter-productively, young people are often blamed for their own predicament. There is a prevailing perception of them as lacking drive, optimism and motiv...

Civil society is made up of thousands of different actors with varying degrees of formality. These actors play different roles in society; some look long term at broader structural issues, others are focused on short-term goals, such as ensuring access to food relief. These organisations have different strategies for engaging with government depending on their objective. Some focus on holding gove...

Storytelling can be used in the non-profit sector as a means of listening and sharing, gaining trust within your network and shaping how you move forward with your work. In this podcast, Embrace Movement for Mothers shares their unique best practices when it comes to storytelling and making the mother a powerful ally in their activism - not only in relation to the child but as a key player sociall...

The late Archbishop Desmond Tutu, or the Arch as he is fondly referred to, once said on hope: “Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness” and on being a wise leader: “Wisdom is when you are able to use your experience for not repeating the mistakes that you have made or others have made. Wisdom is being able to affirm others and knowing that you are not a one-man ba...

How can we explore and create new approaches for achieving a more equal society that tackles both social and environmental challenges? How can we reimagine social systems and institutions to bring about positive change? We need to start at the very beginning, by challenging the premises on which existing social structures are based. Systems thinking is about investigating what set of factors and i...

As civil society, we see ourselves as drivers of change. But, sometimes we can get so bogged down in the day-to-day humdrum of our work, that we lose our energy and drive to explore new terrain – to find new ways of doing things. We also sometimes lose sight of the inner progression that is happening in ourselves, and our role in manifesting the future. Developed by Otto Scharmer, Theory U is an a...

Where lies our hope at the moment? The last two years have been challenging for civil society. The COVID-19 pandemic heightened the inequalities of South Africa and NPOs, as always, stepped in to offer a helping hand on the ground amidst a series of corruption reports and violent eruptions in KwaZulu-Natal. Individuals came together to do this while dealing with their own challenges within their o...

Many NGOs work with children and young people – and mostly with children and young people who grow up in exceptionally difficult circumstances. Poverty and inequality often form the backdrop to a difficult and painful childhood marred by toxic environments of violence and abuse that leave children and young people traumatised. Waves for Change is an NPO with a very specific approach to dealing wit...