In support of
Afrika Tikkun’s Garden to Kindergarten Programme

To celebrate his 60th birthday, Steve would like to invite you to join him in reaching the target of $10 000 AUD / £5 400 / ZAR 107 000 to support Afrika Tikkun’s Garden to Kindergarten programme in Orange Farm for a whole year and continue Sandi’s legacy.

Click Here to Support This Fundraiser

In 2018, Steve Jacobson and his sister Val Mardon worked with Afrika Tikkun to set up the Garden to Kindergarten project in memory of their late sister, Sandi Jacobson, aka Millie Khumalo.

The idea was to craft a programme that would improve the lives and prospects of South African children and at the same time honour Sandi’s primary passions; growing vegetables in combination with growing young minds and bodies.

The programme, which originally started in Orange Farm – where the vegetable garden bears Sandi’s name – is now running across all five of Afrika Tikkun’s centres in Diepsloot, Orange Farm, Braamfontein, Alexandra and Mfuleni. Each centre has a flourishing garden in which the programme takes place. These gardens are spaces of learning but also produce a large portion of the fresh produce that is used to make daily meals for the children, young people and staff at Afrika Tikkun’s centres.

The programme teaches children, ages 5-to-6, about the art of growing vegetables, the value of fresh organically grown nutrition, food security, food sovereignty and the wonder of growing food from seed.

Given the current context of food insecurity, made even worse by the covid-19 pandemic, this programme is incredibly important and Afrika Tikkun is looking to extend its reach to more children.

I first met Herby Rosenberg more than 25 years ago at the inception of the formation of MA Afrika Tikkun. I had heard about the man’s legal prowess, his sharp wit, and his all engaging style. I became aware very quickly of the magic of the man.

And I witnessed a trait working with him over 15 years which has helped to define one of the key principles that I have tried to live my life by: the kindness of always looking for something positive, no matter the chaos of any situation.

Herby brought a humane approach to the “business” of dealing with people in need. He was always a leader, always thinking about big picture issues while still paying attention to individuals and their own unique needs and requirements. Herby made time for people, he made you feel that you genuinely mattered in his life irrespective of your standing or status.

Herby epitomised the gentleman. He was at all times gentle, courteous, and impeccably dressed. Equally, his mannerism was impeccable. And this had a material impact on the name and reputation of Afrika Tikkun and the various organisations he was involved in.

His love for South Africa and its people was matched by his strongly Zionist feelings and commitments. He saw the importance of his role within the South African Jewish community as contributing towards building support for Israel. He also saw his passion for initiatives such as the South African Friends of Ben Gurion University underpinning his ability to spread himself across numerous boards. In his later years, Herby became an important ambassador while fulfilling the role of executive deputy chairperson of Afrika Tikkun.

Herby had an ability to engage in multiple projects simultaneously. He could move between the South African Institute of Directors’ meetings to the board of governors of the South African Zionist Federation without missing a step. He had a broad-based intellect that offered advice but always from a highly moralistic perspective.

He was the consummate board member, and had a unique ability to relate to the executives of various entities that he was involved with. His “entertainment expense” account was something that caused a great deal of mirth within Tikkun. You see, one could see just how many times Herby would entertain key stakeholders with tea and cake, something indicative of the social being that defined Herby. People from all walks of life simply loved him, and for good reason.

In every meeting spent with Herby, he would initiate the meeting with some positive compliment for someone in the room. This habit of his ensured that our meetings would invariably start positively and with an element of human touch.

Herby was rare to anger and quick to find praise. His love and his respect for his wife, Sandra, and his deep regard and love for his sons, Clifford and Stanley, were evident in a way in which he often spoke of them.

While Herby might no longer be with us, his spirit will always be a part of the DNA that defines our organisation.

• Marc Lubner is group chief executive of Afrika Tikkun.

American philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, and her husband Dan Jewett have donated a substantial grant to Afrika Tikkun, who was selected as one of the 286 beneficiaries worldwide.

“Because community-centred service is such a powerful catalyst and multiplier, we spent the first quarter of 2021 identifying and evaluating equity-oriented non-profit teams working in areas that have been neglected,” Scott said in a statement. “Over 700 million people globally still live in extreme poverty. To find solutions, we all benefit from on-the-ground insights and diverse engagement, so we prioritised organisations with local teams, leaders of colour, and a specific focus on empowering women and girls.”

“After building our youth development model over the last 15 years, we are thrilled to have a global icon recognise the value and impact of our Cradle to Career model. This, together with the letter of intent signed by Minister Lindiwe Zulu of the Department of Social Development will amplify our reach and impact. It will help us greatly in deepening and scaling our model to empower, uplift, skill, and feed more young people in this country, ” says Marc Lubner, Afrika Tikkun Group CEO.

Afrika Tikkun is thrilled and humbled to be selected as one of the recipients. “This gift is recognition of our potential to scale up our award-winning Cradle to Career 360º interventions, and in doing so, educate, empower, skill, and feed more young people in South Africa,” said Group CEO Marc Lubner. “We aim to reach over 1 million young people in the next 5 years and this donation will help us substantially to reach that goal.”

The MacKenzie Scott gift will also enable Afrika Tikkun to continue to facilitate strategic partnerships and community-level collaborations that have been so instrumental to its success. “The donation will allow us to leverage further funding from government and our corporate donors, to have a scaleable and mateirla impact,” Lubner notes. “Engaging with these entities, particularly on our skills development programmes, will eventually contribute to job creation and the reduction of youth unemployment. Young people under the age of 35 account for the bulk of South Africa’s population; investing in them equals investing in our collective future.”

Achieving this can only be done by actively and holistically tackling the various socioeconomic challenges many young men and women face. This is one of the main reasons that the holistic nature of Afrika Tikkun’s approach, which seeks to educate the whole child and recognises how social and economic factors affect learning, has been so widely embraced. “By working with community-based partners to scale up our Cradle to Career model, we will sharing our lessons and knowledge amassed over the decades, while also capacitating these organisations to become sustainable.”

In addition, with the gift, Afrika Tikkun will be able to focus even more on its Agripreneurship Incubation and Digitization programmes, current offerings that proritise sustainable income for young people, environmental protection and skills development in for ever-changing learning and working environments.

Lubner concludes. “We are grateful and truly honoured that MacKenzie and Dan recognise Afrika Tikkun’s potential to achieve long term impact and to reach greater numbers beyond those who

attend our centres and encourage support from our current loyal stakeholders to ensure we remain sustainable.”

Bertie Lubner Week was adopted by the Alumni members from the Alumni programme Conference in 2018. Its mandate is to provide an opportunity for Alumni members to volunteer and celebrate Bertie Lubner’s birthday and his legacy that has benefited many young people in South Africa. In the year 2021, the Alumni network will hosted its third annual Bertie Lubner Week on the 15^th– 18^th March 2021 in all Afrika Tikkun Johannesburg and Cape Town centres. There were over 450 young people that volunteered and celebrated Bertie Lubner’s legacy in 2020. This year we aimed to engage more than 500 Alumni members for this wonderful occasion.

Objective

To promote volunteerism in celebration of Bertie Lubner’s legacy from the 15^th– 18^th March 2021.

Main activities in a week view

International Women’s Day is a day recognized globally, meant to highlight the collective achievements of women for over a century. With its first gathering in 1911, the mandate is still the same in every corner of the world – which is to accelerate women’s equality without any fear or favour.

With that said, let us zoom in and take a closer look at why this is such an important day for you and me and the next generation of trailblazers. This year’s theme #ChooseToChallenge is a direct aim at all genders in all spaces to have the courage to question and challenge some of the injustices that still breed and give birth to inequalities and gender parities. In other words, the #ChooseToChallenge is asking us to conduct an environmental scan and identify some of the age-old practices that hinder the development of more than half of the population of the country. Some examples include the disparities in the labour market with men still earning between 25% – 45% more than women. Also, while the Black woman is most likely to be unemployed in South Africa according to Statistics South Africa (Stats SA), the International Labour Organisation (ILO) has reported that more women than men have lost their jobs due to the COVID-19 crisis, with 5% of women losing their employment in 2020 versus 3.9% for men. This grim reality paints a picture of households losing their income thus unable to sustain themselves. It may also spell out more vulnerable women who are most likely to find themselves in compromised situations to keep their homes afloat. The dare to challenge the status quo is a song we should all be singing because everything under the socio-economic sun is connected. We cannot address one issue and neglect the other – which brings us to the justice system and the efforts currently in place to fill the crevices that fracture our society.

Did you know that the South African Police Services (SAPS) reported 2 300 cases relating to Gender-Based Violence (GBV) during the first week of our national lockdown? This resulted in the head of state declaring it our second pandemic – a declaration that some communities may beg to differ and instead, rename it our greatest pandemic that refuses to flatten and bring dignity back into our homes. Unfortunately, the 2 300 cases mentioned are the cases that were reported – leaving us with the burning question of how many cases never saw the light of day.

Could it be that the numbers reported may have been avoided had our COVID-19 response took into consideration the pandemic that already lingered in our streets? May this serve as another reminder as to why you and I need to rise to the occasion and #ChooseToChallenge all information presented to us, to ask ourselves why we could not predict the outcomes of having women trapped with their abusers as a precautionary measure against a deadly virus.

While there are many milestones ahead of us in an attempt to make our spaces pro-women and progressive, we cannot choose to not acknowledge and commend some of the women in leadership who have shown us that there is no such thing as a woman’s place – that it does not matter where you place her, her determination and drive is just as commendable as her male counterpart. Hats off to governments led by intuitive women who not only steered their countries from danger but they also kept their citizens at the heart of every decision. Even though we are still in the middle of our fight against the spread of the coronavirus, we would like to thank women in the field of medicine as well as science and technology, the courageous women who wake up every day and show up despite the health risks involved – you chose to challenge the narrative and broke into industries that once excluded you.

Date and time:

6.30 – 7.30pm UK, 8.30 – 9.30pm South Africa 
World AIDS Day, Tuesday 1 December

JOIN LIVESTREAM

Three of the world’s leading experts on HIV/AIDS join us for a World AIDS Day special livestream. We look at the impact of HIV on children and parenting, including in the context of Covid, with world authorities Dr Shaffiq Essajee and Professor Lorraine Sherr.Then Professor Peter Piot will talk about his experience as the head of the UN’s AIDS programme for more than a decade, as well as his co­
discovery of the Ebola virus and his personal as well as professional
battle with COVID. He will be in conversation with Lord Daniel
Finkelstein.
Joining us as co-host will be Becky Kroger, HIV youth advocate and an Ambassador for One to One Children’s Fund.

Professor Peter Piot

Peter Piot is Director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and one of the world’s leading virologists. He was the co­discoverer of the Ebola virus in 1976 and has spent his career fighting infectious diseases. He headed the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS between 1995 and 2008 and was undersecretary general of the UN. Peter has written a fascinating account of his incredible life on the front lines in the fight against deadly diseases and an amusing critique of some of the world leaders, and dictators, he has met, in his inspiring memoir, NO TIME TO LOSE. Peter has been at the forefront of preparations for new epidemics to come and fell dangerously ill with Covid-19 in mid-March, still living with the after-effects.

Dr Shaffiq Essajee

Shaffiq Essajee is the Deputy Chief of UNICEF’s global HIV/AIDS programmes. He is a clinician, scientist and public health specialist who has been caring for children with HIV in New York and his native Kenya for over 20 years. His work on the genetic diversity of HIV in children could change the way the virus is treated around the world. Shaffiq took over the Chair of PATA (Paediatric and Adolescent AIDS Treatment for Africa) from David Altschuler last year.

Professor Lorraine Sherr

Lorraine Sherr is a clinical psychologist and a Professor of Clinical and Health Psychology at University College London. She works at national and international levels on HIV, mental health, treatment adherence, gender, parenting and cognitive development. Her expertise on the cognitive impact on children in HIV-affected families has led to the development of One to One’s Bright Start programme.

Lord Daniel Finkelstein

The conversation will be moderated by Lord Daniel Finkelstein, a member of the House of Lords, and a political columnist and associate editor of The Times.

Becky Kroger

Becky Kroger was one of the first children to receive antiretroviral medication in South Africa, receiving this through a One to One
Children’s Fund programme. Now, some two decades later, Becky leads a full and thriving life, and is a leading youth advocate for young people with HIV. She was DFID’s official youth delegate at AIDS 2018.

In 2015, the international community agreed to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, a set of 17 goals comprising 169 targets to make the world a better, more equitable, and sustainable place for all. The deadline was set for 2030. A lot has been achieved since then, but more needs to be done, says Alef Meulenberg, CEO of the development arm of Afrika Tikkun. “More work needs to be done to ensure everyone in and outside South Africa, particularly children and young people, can reach their potential by 2030, despite the disastrous impact of Covid-19,” says Meulenberg.

A problem which has worsened this year is youth unemployment. Released on 29 September 2020, StatsSA’s latest Quarterly Labour Force Survey shows that in the second quarter, 44.7% of South Africans aged 15-24 were not working nor in school or receiving training compared to 40.3% in the same period in 2019.

Hunger and Malnutrition

Child hunger has also increased. In the latest National Income Dynamics Study-Coronavirus Rapid Mobile Survey, 15% of respondents reported that a child in their household went hungry at least once per week during the lockdown. At least 16% of these children were younger than seven.

“This is frightening, as hunger and malnutrition impact a child for the rest of his or her life,” says Meulenberg, referring to the link between malnutrition and stunting. “Research shows that adults who went hungry and were stunted as children are more likely to be unemployed, thus extra vulnerable to being trapped in the cycle of poverty. This affects our nation as a whole and prevents us from moving forward.”

No excuse to delay action

Whilst Covid-19 has amplified many hardships youths face, Meulenberg feels the virus shouldn’t be used as an excuse to delay action. “Youth unemployment, hunger, and poverty have been endemic for years. Covid-19 has only shown us what can happen when social problems remain unaddressed and is, therefore, a reason to do more,” he stresses.

This requires stakeholders such as the government, the private sector, civil society, innovators, and development experts to work together harder and smarter to meet the SDGs, particularly those affecting young people. It all boils down to innovative and holistic partnerships and developmental solutions that tackle more than one child and youth-related SDG.

Afrika Tikkun Cradle to Career model

“The Cradle to Career model of Afrika Tikkun is a good example of how one can make a sustained impact. Besides involving different players – from government agencies to private businesses – this youth development approach focuses on all aspects of child well-being. This includes boosting their access to food, education and healthcare early in life to pave the way for gender equality, creating meaningful work opportunities, and fostering sustainable communities,” Meulenberg says.

“This multi-stakeholder, multi-layered approach has helped us reach thousands of youths and their families across the country, allowing them to change their future.”

Meulenberg urges stakeholders to implement impactful measures now, and not tomorrow: “The year 2030 may be something of the distant future, but in fact, it is not. It is just ten years from now,” he says. “Fact of the matter is that our young people do not have ten years.”

Tumisang Mohoto is a 17-year-old grade 11 Maths and Sciences pupil at Mphethi Mahlatsi Secondary School. As part of Afrika Tikkun’s career development focus in October, Tumisang engaged the Gradesmatch website, which aligns learners with their ideal careers based on their academic performance, and not necessarily on what they love. Gradesmatch also assists learners in choosing higher education institutions.

Tumisang would love to study Actuarial Science or Law at the University of Witwatersrand or the University of Cape Town. He’s drawn to Actuarial Science is because he strongly believes black representation in the industry is still very low, something he sees this as an opportunity. On the other hand, Tumisang’s interest in law stems from his consistently good performance in history.  He also loves critical thinking, public speaking and debating.

At Afrika Tikkun’s Arekopaneng Centre in Orange Farm, Tumisang’s participation in centre-level activities like Spelling Bee, and Quiz and Debate and has helped build his confidence, developed his critical thinking skills, sharpened his public speaking and oral presentation skills and forced him to be more solution-oriented.

While he was grateful for the insight presented by Gradesmatch, Tumisang was disappointed when Afrika Tikkun couldn’t host the annual Career Day because of the national lockdown. “I believe learners should be motivated about subject choices in grade 9 and more of them should pursue maths and science because it helps in problem solving,” Tumisang stated.

14-year-old Zenande Mndini is one of many young people experiencing challenges since the outbreak of the pandemic. A participant in our Child and Youth Development Programme, Zenande stays with her mother and four siblings in Mfuleni, Western Cape. Her mother and 22-year-old older sister, Asemahle Mndini, are the family’s breadwinners.

“There was no form of entertainment and I was bored because schools, churches and the centre was closed,” Zenande said, when asked about life under lockdown. “I would call my friends to come to my house and we would do nothing the whole day. Some of the challenges of being stuck at home is that you run out of things to do and end up getting in trouble. Some of the things that affected my friends and I during the lockdown include getting in trouble with the police. We couldn’t go to the Spaza shops to buy chips/sweets because the police would tell us to go home.”

Zenande’s family as a whole was affected by the pandemic as her sister Asemahle had lost her job. This meant they could no longer afford the essentials or send money and/or groceries to other family members in the Eastern Cape. Zenande’s mother also looked after two children at their home, an activity she was paid for on a monthly basis. However, this was discontinued because the children’s parent lost their job due to the economic strains of the pandemic. For Zenande’s family, this meant there would be even less income to sustain them from month to month.

In due course, Asemahle found a job and was able to provide for her family again. What made things even better for the family was the food parcels they received from Afrika Tikkun. “Afrika Tikkun played a big role, if not the biggest in making sure that my family and I have food to eat,” Zenande said. “They did not only help me and my family but families in the community as well. I am happy they could help because many families lost jobs during the lockdown.”

When schools, churches and the centre started operating again, Zenande was excited to live her ‘normal’ life again. “I am happy to be back in school and thereafter come to Afrika Tikkun because I missed the daily sessions and activities we used to do before the pandemic erupted,” she said.

In 2018, Marc Lubner, then CEO of Afrika Tikkun NPC, began raising the importance of regreening the townships as part of Afrika Tikkun living its value of responsible kindness. “There’s a need for Afrika Tikkun to demonstrate in practical terms, how, through the planting of trees, we can teach moral regeneration and the value of life,” Marc said. “If a child is taught the value of caring for the life of a plant, then the child will treasure and value all lives.”

As a result, in September 2019, Afrika Tikkun’s Wings of Life Centre in Diepsloot, partnered with Plantnation to plant 80 trees at the centre and at the Basa Tutorial School. These trees are mainly indigenous and local fruit trees, making them adaptable to the conditions and requiring less water. This is particularly important given that the centre often experiences water shortages. In June 2020, an assessment was done to determine how many of the trees survived. We are happy to see that 90% of them are alive and growing well.

The aim of this project is to bring more life in the community, remembering that we inhale oxygen from the trees and trees inhale carbon dioxide. Mr David Mokwena, primary caretaker of the trees at Wings of Life Centre, enjoys this task of nurturing the trees and watering them at least three days a week. “I’m happy the trees are growing so well; they look so green and healthy,” David said. “Although losing 5 out of the 80 trees still makes me feel sad.”

We look forward to these trees beautifying our centre for many years to come.