I had the privilege of meeting a remarkable young woman on a flight to Joburg recently.
She was travelling for business, but her true mission was much deeper: she feels called to help the young people in her church community to find their path to employment.
Her own journey — from a schoolgirl in Mthatha to a valued member of a major manufacturing company in Gqeberha — was filled with challenges and learning.
Now, she’s determined to share her experiences to make the way clearer for others.
She’s even developing a training manual and a list of essential skills to empower young people.
What she needs now is support to turn her vision into reality.
Listening to her story filled me with encouragement and excitement — not just because of her drive, but because I knew that, thanks to the spirit of collaboration we’ve fostered in the Bay, I could connect her to the support she needs.
Our community has reached a tipping point: collaboration and the willingness to share knowledge are now the norm.
There’s a genuine joy in networking and in being the “village” that raises its children.
At a recent three-day “train the trainer” session led by the outstanding team at the Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator, eight community-based organisations, many of them from our church communities, came together to learn to deliver Harambee’s work readiness modules.
These modules have been developed by Harambee over 12 years of helping young people transition into the world of work.
Harambee is now giving these work-readiness modules and the method of delivering them to organisations in an effort to enable this work to be done on a much larger scale.
These modules can be shared with your organisation too.
The modules cover important topics including: understanding your personal brand; adopting a growth mindset; exercising self-discipline; developing accountability and initiative; the importance of resilience and perseverance; building a positive mindset; communication skills; building relationships; teamwork; engaging with my work environment; career readiness; financial wellness; and personal wellness.
The organisations which attend workshops can integrate the modules into their programmes, expand what they already do, and provide their facilitators with professional development and networking experience.
The calibre, the heart and the willingness to work together of the people in the room left me convinced: as a city, we are on the brink of something remarkable.
It was also clear that these organisations are deeply connected to our youths.
They are highly motivated to lift fellow young people out of despair and poverty into empowerment and earning through value creation — and are willing to collaborate to achieve it.
It was to these organisations that I was able to connect my co-traveller on the flight.
Now imagine what we wouldachieve if these organisations don’t just collaborate with each other, but if employers in the Bay more intentionally collaborated with them, and the other community-based organisations in the metro.
Through these community-based organisations we could collaborate to create pools of work-ready young people in each community from which nearby employers could source exciting, work-ready, entry-level talent.
We must also recognise that there are only enough formal jobs for about a third of our Bay’s youth.
We also need to enable the gig economy, self-employment and micro-enterprises.
With collaboration we can enable these ways to earnand grow the market for products and services of the formal businesses which collaborate in the enablement of these additional income streams.
Many people in the Bay have been working tirelessly to pump the well of collaboration, and now the flow is making a real impact.
Notably, the Nelson Mandela Bay Business Chamber has brought businesses in the metro together, achieving levels of collaboration that deliver tangible results.
The chamber has been encouraging businesses to form “clusters” in their geographic areas which work together to achieve things individual companies could not achieve alone.
In another example, church-facilitated City Dialogue working groups have created platforms for sharing essential learnings and building powerful networks.
Each has a specific mandate, such as youth empowerment and addressing crime, and the project is proving to be very powerful.
Permission to collaborate has been granted. We don’t have to be independent superheroes.
If you feel inspired to act, know that you may take action and that you don’t have to do so alone.
There is enough wisdom and a strong appetite to share that wisdom.
The spirit of collaboration is opening new networks across our Bay. None of us is more than a few connections away from someone who can offer real support.
We have long worked in frustrating silos, but now, collaboration is unfolding all around us.
Expect it.
Call it forth in your community — not just in fostering youth employment, but in any cause close to your heart.
Working together, we are achieving remarkable things. There is room for each one of us to experience the power of collaboration.
My prayer over our community is that as the Holy Spirit prompts us to love and serve one another, the willingness to collaborate willgrow and it will become a strategy for us to achieve exponentially more that we dreamt possible.
Sue Hagemann, business coach and consultant with Ignite Business Solutions.
The Herald
