OPINION: A single children’s book led to the launch of an impactful grassroots organisation that is rolling out its services to more children, writes Andrew Boraine and Brian Adams.
One children’s book was all it took for Litha Sam-Sam from Vrygrond to start a children’s reading and literacy initiative at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Two years later, Loxion Mobile Library is a small and impactful grassroots organisation that is rolling out its services to more children with the support of a unique state resourced employment scheme that is supporting hundreds of other small community building initiatives in South Africa.
In 2020, with Covid-19 safety protocols firmly in place, school going children across South Africa were not at their desks every day and were instead forced to follow a roster that staggered their school attendance throughout the week.
In many resource starved communities, this meant children found themselves with time on their hands and no access to supervised activities and resources to keep them occupied and engaged.
At the time, Sam-Sam was 20-years-old and having noticed children roaming the streets with nothing to do, he took the one children’s book he had and began reading to a few interested children.
His efforts gained attention and attracted a small band of committed volunteers who understood the value of the initiative.
Sustainability
In 2022, Sam-Sam has grown his humble initiative into the Loxion Mobile Library which supports children’s reading and literacy skills in Vrygrond, where the organisation is based, and the surrounding communities of Sea Winds, Lavender Hill and Overcome.
While extraordinary in its growth and impact, Loxion Mobile Library and the team of volunteers who have built its success is not unique among the many grassroots initiatives across South Africa who are building social value in their communities.
What these initiatives have in common is that they are ground-up responses informed by local intelligence and the lived experience of those directly confronted by the issues that they are building solutions for.
But despite good intentions, grassroots interventions based on volunteerism are often unsustainable in the long run because sustainability has not been baked into their vision and mission.
That’s because volunteer efforts are usually an immediate response to a crisis and sustaining the momentum in the long term requires resources to implement structure, build robust organisation skills and fulfill efficient administration, so that impact can be sustained long afterwards.
And while volunteers who live in the low-income communities that they serve are investing their time and energy into the greater good of their community, they don’t usually benefit from creating a means of survival for themselves by doing this work.
By adjusting our lens for a wider perspective of this reality, we would see vulnerable communities face the double whammy of inequality and rising unemployment, while at the same time carrying the bulk of the burden of social care without much support and resources.
Getting lost in the funding labyrinth
Grassroots organisations attempting to attract and access legitimate funding sources get lost in the bureaucratic weeds because they lack the know-how to meet complicated funding proposal requirements.
To date, there has not been an effective state instrument that allows non-state actors such as Loxion Mobile Library to do their work in a manner that also addresses the issue of unemployment.
Public Employment Schemes – while important in facilitating pathways to formal employment - have not capitalised on the existing skills, networks and creativity of grassroots community workers who are contributing towards the greater good of society while building reliable networks of solidarity to sustain society through crises.
Social Employment
In recognition of a "whole of society" approach, the Presidential Employment Stimulus (PES) in 2021 established the R800 million Social Employment Fund (SEF), which aims to create 50 000 jobs for unemployed people performing acts of service across the country. Currently, the SEF is supporting 28 contracted civil society organisations across South Africa – which includes rural and urban areas – in various programmes, including the arts, early childhood development and community safety, among others.
Those CSOs with organising capacity have in turn connected SEF resources to smaller, mainly informal organisations. In this way the capacity to generate social value is built from the ground up. This unique "social employment" strategy creates work opportunities while at the same time recognising and supporting the public value created by local initiatives and organisations.
Widespread unemployment is a national crisis and while market development strategies are important, they take time to deliver results and tend to reach the most marginalised far slower than if the unemployed were targeted directly with jobs. This is why direct public investment in employment and livelihoods is necessary to achieve the economic recovery agenda, especially in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The advantage of the social employment scheme is that it can create jobs right now, and at the same time support the delivery of much needed community services.
“We grew from nothing to something.”
On the ground, the modest funding from the SEF is now having exponential returns. Loxion Mobile Library’s Sam-Sam explains that the organisation has found a sense of direction, is building capacity and is propelled by a fresh momentum that is attracting the attention of new supporters and advocates.
Volunteers for the Loxion Mobile Library are receiving a stipend to do the work that they have already been doing and are well versed in, with ten volunteers now employed for eight days a month for the next seven months – made possible through the SEF.
“We grew from nothing to something and these days every afternoon we get young people coming to us asking us if they can help. We didn’t have a proper structure before getting funded but now we do our work in a professional way and it’s getting us more organised to grow.”
*Andrew Boraine is CEO of the Western Cape Economic Development Partnership (EDP) and Brian Adams is the EDP Programme Lead for the Social Employment Fund and the Social Employment Network.
**The views expressed here are not necessarily those of IOL or of title sites.
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