Common Good First
By Heather Dugmore
An activist architect who designs beautiful township schools using recycled wooden pallets and glass and plastic bottles. A centre for orphaned and vulnerable children that funds itself with its own on-site micro-enterprises, including a bakery and hair salon.
These are two of the many leading-edge social innovation and community projects in South Africa that will be showcased on a new online global network and digital creativity space called Common Good First. The link goes live in the Eastern Cape in November.
To facilitate this, a Common Good First digital creativity space, the first of its kind in Africa was opened on 22 October at Nelson Mandela University’s Bird Street Campus in Port Elizabeth. It is the first of several to be launched at Common Good First’s six partner universities in South Africa, as well as Scotland, Norway, Iceland and Spain.
“This is such a unique opportunity to not only showcase the social innovation projects but also to open university spaces to members of the community and take the university into the community to co-create responses to societal issues,” says Professor Darelle van Greunen, Director of the Centre for Community Technologies (CCT) at Nelson Mandela University, which oversaw the digital platform build, with support from the University of the Western Cape.
The developer and UK leader and coordinator of the project is Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU) in Glasgow, Scotland. Nelson Mandela University is the lead South African partner and coordinator. The project is funded by a European Union (EU) education programme called Erasmus +.
In the Common Good First digital creativity space, social innovators and community project members have free, walk-in access to ICT tools, internet, devices and training to upload the story of their project, images and short videos. The categories include Health & Wellbeing, Education and Social Projects and the online platform will be accessed through the Tell Your Story window on the website www.commongoodfirst.com.
Facilitated workshops to assist social innovators to improve their digital literacy and video editing skills will be offered as part of the capacity building programme for social innovation. Simple, clear instructions about how to tell the stories of innovation will be available on the website.
One of the participating social innovators who spoke at the opening is Kevin Kimwelle, a Port-Elizabeth-based activist architect who is doing his PhD on localised, socially innovative, green designs that promote social change. He devotes his skills to co-creating beautiful buildings in- and with communities, using recycled materials such as wooden crates, glass and plastic bottles.
The pre-school he designed in Joe Slovo West township in the Nelson Mandela Bay Metro, that is built from recycled wooden pallets and bottles, has received several accolades, including nomination for 2017 Design Indaba MBOISA (Most Beautiful Object in South Africa) and winner of the 2018 South African Property Owners Association’s (SAPOA) Most Transformative Project in South Africa.
For the Masifunde educational academy in Walmer township in the Nelson Mandela Bay Metro, Kimwelle used a combination of conventional and unconventional materials, as he explains: “The shell of the building is mainly made of brick and mortar while the internal partitions are from recycled wooden pallets. The building maximises on passive design (natural lighting and ventilation with no mechanical systems) by using extractor chimneys to cool it off in summer, and it is north facing with large facades to maximise on the winter sun. The building is inviting and brings a vibrant youthfulness to the community it serves.”
Another of his projects is an early childhood development centre made from plastic bottles in Nelson Mandela Bay Metro’s Gqabera township, using an ecobrick (a two-litre plastic bottle stuffed solid with non-biodegradable waste to create a reusable building block).
Kimwelle explains that community members participate in the builds, and as part of the process, spinoff businesses are created by members of the community such as making furniture from the pallets or learning how to build their own spaza shops. “It’s about architecture and development coming together and it takes bold people to commit to a social innovation approach.”
At the opening of the event, Nelson Mandela University’s Chancellor, Dr Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi said to the social innovators present: Your work, whatever it may be, has the power to transform lives in a positive way, your dreams and ambitions too.”
The initial Common Good First target for South Africa is 90 projects. Other facilities and labs at the partner South African universities – Rhodes University, the University of the Western Cape, Free State University, North West University and the University of Johannesburg – will be ready in the first quarter of 2019.
“All communities, irrespective of their socio-economic status, have an exceptional ability to tackle social problems and find innovative solutions. From feeding and educating children, to overcoming gangsterism, to growing the township economy, the many social innovation approaches developed in South Africa are remarkable and will be showcased on Common Good First,” says van Greunen.
She adds that innovators’ lives are filled with highs and lows that test their resilience and push them to overcome challenges. Their stories and the lessons learnt will be shared on the Common Good First platform.
“The platform is precisely about social innovators, entrepreneurs and communities worldwide connecting, working together and finding solutions and approaches to social challenges, many of which are similar worldwide. Scotland, for example, shares several similar problems to South Africa, including gangsterism, educational crises and poverty,” says the Director of Digital Collaboration from GCU, Julie Adair, who is leading the project from GCU’s side.
“The South African universities included in the project all have strong community engagement programmes and relationships with their communities. Overall, the depth of community engagement in South African universities is far more advanced than in Europe,” adds Adair who has worked in interactive content since the mid-90s in senior roles at the BBC and The Walt Disney Company. She was part of the birth of BBC Online. At Disney, as Director of Online, Adair was in charge of websites across Europe, growing teams and content in twenty-three countries and developing output for mobile and tablet platforms.
At the opening of the Nelson Mandela University digital storytelling space, GCU’s Vice-Chancellor, Professor Pamela Gillies, said: “In order to contribute to helping solve the many social and environmental challenges we face, and to do so in a way that supports sustainable social progress, we desperately need social innovations embracing new strategies, concepts, ideas and organisations. And we all know that we are more likely to be successful in this aim through truly coordinated, reciprocal and collaborative approaches, growing trust and social capital along the way.
“Our university’s commitment to working with our friends and colleagues in South Africa has had a long history and we host a unique Scottish and ANC archive of material about the struggle against apartheid over the last 50 years, which is now digitally available to scholars from around the world.”
Glasgow was the very first City in the UK to award President Mandela its Freedom in 1981 whilst he was still incarcerated, and in 1993 he went to Glasgow to accept the award and an Honorary Doctorate from GCU.
GCU’s Chancellor is superstar and social change agent Annie Lennox who is the founder of The Circle, an NGO that supports a range of projects worldwide to assist women in need, and to empower women to become independent, confident, able to stand up for their rights, and to influence change.
One of the case studies for the Common Good First’s pilot project, completed last year, is the Tshepang Programme for Orphans and Vulnerable Children – one of the social innovation projects in their pilot project, completed last year in partnership with the Faculty of Management at UJ. Tshepang was established in 2006 by social worker Susan Rammekwa, formerly the Assistant Director of the Johannesburg Child Welfare Society.
Rammekwa is highly entrepreneurial in her approach to raising funds and securing support for Tshepang. Micro enterprises have been established on their premises, including a hair salon, scone bakery and vegetable garden, the profits from which are reinvested in Tshepang.
When asked how they share their story, Rammekwa said: “Via word of mouth and we have a website, which one of our supporters has offered to upgrade. We have pamphlets that the school of hospitality at the University of Johannesburg did for us that share our story.”
“There is so much more that outstanding social innovation projects like this can do to market and communicate their stories, raise their profile and attract funders. The digital platform we will create for them to do this will be easy to use; it will be like filling in a Facebook or Linkedin profile, where they can add as they go along,” says Adair.
“Based on the high usage of mobile phone technology in South Africa, the project has ensured that these platforms are at the heart of our content and application development,” adds Van Greunen. “We will also be making provision for the lack of connectivity in many of our rural areas. We will be drawing on storing and uploading solutions that the CCT has developed in the healthcare space. We will also be creating local area networks and smart centres, such as in libraries or community centres.”
