Mail & Guardian Reporter
Five NGOs walked away with R50 000 each in Ashoka’s Citizen Base Initiative Awards earlier this week.
The winners were the Joubert Park Neighbourhood Development Association, the Western Cape Blind Association, Fair Trade in Tourism South Africa, The Kids Care Project Trust and Agape Copeland Train.
The competition is held in six countries Brazil, Argentina, India, Thailand, Bangladesh and South Africa and recognises innovative ideas in local resource mobilisation (or creative resourcing) presented by NGOs, and provides the seed capital to launch these ideas.
“Whereas many organisations invest in NGO capacity building or transferring ‘Western’ resource mobilisation strategies that fit awkwardly into most other contexts, Ashoka’s Citizen Base Initiative is the only programme worldwide providing the seed capital and support necessary for NGOs to develop creative resourcing strategies appropriate for their missions, cultures and existing assets,” says the director of Ashoka South Africa, Fazila Farouk.
Farouk says creative resourcing brings with it many gains, including increased flexible funding, more accountability to the constituents served and a greater potential of sustainability as a diversified funding base reduces risk.
“While fund-raising is only about raising money and is traditionally donor-driven, creative resourcing is a comprehensive approach to mobilising and managing available and potential resources identifying and marketing mutually beneficial relationships between an NGO and the community it serves. Creative resourcing emphasises the importance of considering all types of support available in order to challenge the perception that an NGO’s constituencies cannot support development work,” says Farouk.
A recent study (The South African Non Profit Sector Study 1) found that there are 98 920 NGOs working in all sectors across South Africa and many are preoccupied with funding their work by attempting to solicit money from the international community.
“Experience in the NGO sector demonstrates that a fund-raising strategy focused purely on raising money from international donors is risky for the long-term sustainability of NGOs. Worldwide the number of NGOs competing for the decreasing pool of resources is increasing, thus creating a situation where NGOs have to turn to new partners closer to home for assistance, develop new ways of mobilising resources and increase professionalism in the sector so that these resources are managed effectively for optimum results,” Farouk says.
Jennifer Seif of Fair Trade in Tourism said: “We don’t want to stay dependant on donor funding it is important for us to diversify and increase our resources.”
About the winners
Joubert Park Neighbourhood Development Association was chosen by South African environmentalists and activists to host Village of Hope, an exhibition area created in conjunction with the World Summit on Sustainable Development. Throughout the summit the exhibition will celebrate and share best practices in sustainable development. To finance the development of the exhibition the association is creating an alternative currency, the “hope”. Supporters of the park and its development (individuals, charities, business and city policy) will purchase hopes for R10, which are then redeemable for R8. The remaining 20% will cover administrative and galvanising costs. Local labour will be hired to complete the exhibition, being paid in hopes.
Western Cape Blind Association is a non-profit NGO and it functions as a development catalyst for blind and partially sighted men and women living in the underdeveloped urban areas of the Cape Metropole in the Western Cape. It seeks to create an enabling environment for people to grow up in and out of. To this end aromatherapy massage training was started in August 1999 at the School of Holistic Aromatherapy. In March last year the first five members graduated as therapists and currently have a client base of 300 people, of which 70 are regulars. Each massage costs R50 per hour, of which R25 goes to the therapist and R25 to the organisation. Initial calculations show that at its current spread, the association will be completely self-financing by June 2002.
Kids Care Project Trust was launched in 1996 to offer supplementary education to school-age children in the areas of the arts, sports and life skills. The NGO advocates and lobbies for children’s rights, creates a safe haven for children after school and developes children’s confidence, self-esteem and assertiveness. It currently serves 620 children in 10 centres. In a creative marketing campaign it buys Wet Wipes from the manufacturers, imprinting the containers with an image and a simple message from a child. On the other side is the number and article from the Convention on the Rights of the Child: “Children have the right to play.”These products are being marketed and sold to fast-food outlets that will in turn sell them to their customers at R1 per wipe. These partnerships will enable the NGO to reach a wider spectrum of customers and will add value to the corporation’s product. These Wet Wipes will also be sold at outdoor festivals, events and parties. The initial projections are that within three months the NGO will be able to generate R180 000.
Agape Copeland Train was created to help secondary students living in rural areas with post- graduation. They often cannot find work and end up trapped and marginalised susceptible to a host of social problems. Agape targets these students, providing them with counseling and civil leadership programming to help develop better opportunities for them. It has set up a career information centre and provides counselling in several different school districts, working with the guidance counsellors and teachers. Its funding base comes from local business but its strategy is to create and engage shareholders rather than ask for money. Market research is essential to the strategy and it demonstrates what it can do for the shareholder rather than what the shareholder can do for it. Shareholders become actively involved in the programme before they ever give funding.
Fair Trade in Tourism South Africa works to empower and “mainstream” community-based and other structurally disadvantaged tourism enterprises, which tend to trade on the margins of international and national tourism markets. It promotes a unique “Fair Trade in Tourism” brand and accompanying trademark. It thus functions as a collective marketing and knowledge service, providing a useful, cost-effective model for accessing tourism markets and building marketing and related capacity in structurally disadvantaged tourism enterprises. While the association is currently rich in donor funding, it recognises that it will not be able to grow and increase the number of tourism enterprises that are trading and benefiting from its brand and trademark unless it diversifies its resource base. To meet this challenge the management team has developed a number of “key ingredients for success” that guide the association’s attempts to mobilise a wide range of financial and non-financial resources. The strategy puts much emphasis on leveraging donor dollars to secure additional resources from South Africa, through, for example, the use of matching funds. Its strategy also incorporates a unique membership fee structure. Through this strategy it anticipates increasing its resource base from R500 000 this year to R1,3-million in 2004, thereby diversifying its total resource base to decrease dependence on international donor funding from 92% this year to 57% in 2004.
ENDS