Mandela Day Tomorrow: How to Make Each of those 67 Minutes Count
17th July 2017
Press Release: BEE Novation’s Inclusion in #MyGrowthFund Business Accelerator
16th September 2017Why We Are Honoured to be Working Beside These People!
We’d like to take this opportunity to convey our gratitude to everyone who helped make our Mandela Day initiative a success yesterday morning. Together, we raised over R14,000 for the Pietermaritzburg’s Children’s Home. That was a significant growth from last year. Which was a significant growth from the previous year… You get the idea!
Here’s some background on it for those of you who were busy doing good in another corner of the world that needed you:
In 2013, BEE Novation answered the Mandela Day 67-minute challenge by creating an initiative called We’re on the Streets so the Children Don’t Have to Be! in which business leaders and concerned citizens “beg” on the streets, as homeless children would, with all proceeds going to the Pietermaritzburg’s Children’s Home. The Home cares for 70 of these children. Mr. Nelson Mandela said, “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children”.
No keener revelation of these kind souls exists than this: that on the ice-cold morning after the Game Of Thrones season premiere reminded us that #WinterIsHere, with temperatures around 6 degrees Celsius, many of them offered time, their businesses’ interested staff-members and money to the battle against child homelessness.
Any of them could have turned back. Many began with the activism much earlier in the morning than most people start their workdays. Yet, against the all-consuming desire to sleep in and press the snooze button, they chose to be a “safety blanket” shielding our society’s children from the total despair of being cold and hungry at this time of the year. Our reason for working with the Home resonated with far more of them than we could have ever hoped: if you helped, you, too, share our dream of a country in which every child is cared for, safe and nurtured.
This is one of the dreams at the heart of the transformation imperative: a society whose soul is revealed to be justice towards its most vulnerable and innocent members, children.
PS: News 24 featured the initiative!
He charts out the socio-economic ramifications of how we move through these three areas by writing political commentary and making vlogs (“video blogs”).
Some of his posts get half a million global reads in less than a week; other pieces get featured on Daily Maverick, Rand Daily Mail and other publications, attracting interviews on eNCA, PowerFM and similar media channels. He seemed an experimental fit for BEE Novation, and he has a book about to hit a shelf near you.
His views on how day-to-day business and political events affect the transformation and BEE landscapes will be available on the BEE Novation website.
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