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.”
