Where in South Africa was this picture taken?

Hi colleagues,

I thought to create a bit of a challenge to help you learn about South Africa. All of this, because I could not resist taking this picture when I passed by....!

This picture was taken just outside a small town somewhere in South Africa. The first person who email me with the correct name of this town, will receive a small prize upon arrival in SA (a cd of an SA artist).

So start emailing! The results will be published here.

Greetings:-) Andrea

Tip: This town is known for having the highest bird specie diversity in the whole world....

Beauty & Art & K&S

Dear all,

The group on Beauty & Art, formed by Kemp, PJ, Petra, Joseph and Marloes, now have two ideas!! One is to arrange one or two visits to something that contributes to / consist of beauty, such as a museum of Art, the theatre, musical inspiration etc.

The other idea is to link with a contact of Andrea, Nikodemis van Rensburg. Check his work on http://www.southafricanartists.com/showartist.asp?Code=VRENS003. At this moment, he works at skills-development and environmental awareness in a youth jail in Soweto, through art therapy. He's looking for ways to realise this project, for instance through finding fundings or other solutions to make it attractive for himself and others to join in.

If anyone would like to join our club, please don't hesitate to get in touch! On the next K&S-dag in Belgium (2nd of June), we will think these ideas through and we would love your help in that!

Warm regards,

The Beauty-team :-)

SEEtrust

The SEEtrust mission is to contribute to a more sustainable way of living through creating and implementing entrepreneurial formulas that combine economical and social development.
To download an overview of SEEtrust, click here.

Our first project is in Roodepoort, Johannesburg, connected to the Tshepang programme.
our site is next to an informal settlement where almost 10.000 people live. Facilities for schooling, care, work are scarce. Next to the settlement developers are creating housing for middle class.
Susan Rammekwa started the 'Tshepang programme' for orphaned and vulnerable children. She started in 2007 and now Susan and her team take care of 160 children everyday and counsel their families and care takers. Tshepang provides meals, learning and social activities, financial support for uniforms and transport and so on.

Our SEEtrust project here:
We bought 2 hectares of construction land and a big house and terrain for the Tshepang program. The construction will provide work and housing and will create the means for extending the Tshepang facilities and create facilities for small entrepreneurial activities (like bakery, workshops)
We will develop 70 apartments, extend the house and add new social and educational facilities, create spaces for bakery and a medical information center, create workshop and housing for local entrepreneurs.
We will sell and partly rent the apartments and commercial spaces, to finance and maintain the social facilities.
We set up a network to support local initiatives: partner with Susan who runs and developes Tshepang, create linkages with professional networks like MKI and Red Palm Bakeries, create micro financing opportunities, etc.

We are now preparing the set up a muffin bakery . This bakery would make muffins for the children and also to sell, and will provide work for 6-8 people and can run economically self sustained. The muffins are a special kind: 'fortified' muffins with a high nutrition value. Reasearch showed that thse muffins increase the health of children significantly within 3 months.
Another initiative is to set up a medical knowledge information center (from basic healthcare education to HIV/Aids protection) in cooperation with the Medical Knowledge Institute (www.infomki.org).
We hope that we can make these projects happen in the coming 6 - 12 monthts. These might also give opportunities for our learning journey.

Another development is that we are trying to further develop and elaborate the SEEtrust approach and formulas. Roodepoort is for SEEtrust one pilot project. We are looking to create new business and development models in the near future and to find locations and partners to make this happen. Think of a combination of low cost and eco friendly housing, enterprise and job development, learning and education, social facilities. We want to grow SEEtrust in an entrepreneurial way. It could also mean that business development can become part of our learning journey.

For more info on SEEtrust, go to our site.

Project Days:

This is a call for everyone to join a project of their choice. Even if you are not traveling to South Africa in September, you can join a group and collaborate.

At the moment the following projects are developing. Contact the person listed for more information:

Publish Post

• Restorative Justice (see posting and links on this site) - contact Maaike to step in
• Art & Beauty (see posting on the basic premise on this site) - contact Kemp to step in
• SEEtrust (this is a location/community to work with many possible themes) - contact Paul Keursten to step in
• The Holocaust Museum in SA - contact Arne to get info and step in
• Participative Practices project - bringing together Participative practitioners to investigate a topic of Change and Transformation - contact Katrien for more information and to step in.
  

Project: Restorative Justice

Communication from Maaike 28 March 09:

I'm very much looking forward to working with all of you on our learning journey to South Africa. We 'found' each other in our joined interest in restorative justice. During our meeting last week during the Kessels & Smit day we decided to organise a skype meeting to reflect on the first steps of our journey. In a following mail, I will send an invitation through 'datumprikker.nl' on which you can specify your availability. (Monique, can you fill this in for Robert?). Mark and Andrea: looking forward to hearing more of your experiences in working on these issues in South-Africa!

For now, I have been googling on interesting articles and websites on restorative justice. There are a few I would like to share with you, our South African colleagues may want to add!

www.khulisaservices.co.za - This is the organisation Mark and Andrea (?) are working with in South Africa on restorative justice issues www.restorativejustice.org -This is an excellent website with a huge library on restorative justice. The makers of the website are Prison
Fellowship International (PFI), an organisation that works on restorative justice and reconciliation all around the world. Howard Zehr is a well-know writer on the subject.

If you want to make a 'quick-start' with reading up on this issue, you can read the one-pager on the previous website with an overview of the concept (http://www.restorativejustice.org/intro) or this three-pager article by Gilman (See attached file: What is restorative justice by
Gilman.pdf)
www.rjcity.org -This is a very interesting project by PFI in which a broad network of people is thinking through how a city of 1 million people that responds as restoratively as possible to crimes, victims and offenders would look like. I really like the idea! The interesting thing
about this project is that it moves beyond specific activities or types of programs that are often used in restorative justice practice, but takes an even more systemic approach. As part of the project they made a 'story' of how responding restoratively to crime can look like. It is an
easy-reader that gives immediate insight: (See attached file: Case study from the RJ city 2007.pdf)

Project: Beauty & Art

Communication from Kemp van Ginkel on 23 March 09:

Joseph, Marloes, Petra and Kemp have agreed to work on the theme of Art & Beauty.

First ideas are:

-to open up people's eyes to the beauty around, by expressing what we think is Beauty in our work and life;

-to support creation of beautiful things / art

-a project in which we use Art to bring people together and create connections

Some first thoughts from 15 minutes of talking....

Who would be interested to work with us from the SA group?

First Communication on 27 March 09

Dear companions,

Last thursday at the European K&S day in the Maliebaan, we worked together on our upcoming learning journey to South Africa in September 2009. It was good to have colleagues from Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany & South Africa there. It was an inspiring afternoon full of ideas and connections.

We will make a Learning Journey, called Shifting Perspectives. And it starts now! In the coming months we will work on several projects and themes, in groups. Below are the first groups that were formed last thursday, please feel free to join or start another group. By working on this projects the coming months, we ensure we will make our visit worthwile for ourselves and the partners we'll be visiting. We will have to make contact with possible SA partners, share ideas for working together and make preparations for the project days in September.

Parallel on working on the projects we will have our 'South Africa Induction' workstream; every month you will receive ideas, perspectives to get to know South Africa. This may be films, tips for books, photos or music, it can be anything. We hope this will help and empower everybody to connect to the beautiful en rich country we will be visiting, a complex place full of new perspectives.

There's also a group of people staying home. We'd like to explore ideas to share experiences, during the entire Learning Journey. If you are one of the colleagues staying home it is of course possible to join one of the groups and journey with in various ways.

Overview of the groups formed on Thursday (contact person is indicated):

Restorative Justice

Robert, Erik, Carsten, Maaike, Katrien, Martijn

Art &Beauty

Marloes, Joseph, Petra, Kemp (contact person)

SEE Trust (this is a location/community to work with many possible themes)

Paul K (contact person), Lieve, Luk, Suzanne, Marcus, Margriet, Esther,
Saskia, Eric, Mariel, Titia.

Other themes communicated and possible groups forming:

Working with Holocaust Centre in Johannesburg as location to work with
issues of diversity etc. (Mark, Arne?)
Professionalisation of Participatory Disciplines (Katrien, Andrea ?)

People staying home

Cora, Alysia, Ans, Monique, Barbara, Astrid, ...

Organisation teams

Induction, Marloes, Martijn, Amanda (supported by Andrea),
Project Days, Andrea, Martijn
Weekend, ?
Working days, Robert, Philippa



Please sent us all your questions about the Learning Journey (practical or other), we will make an Question and Answer overview for everybody.

Look forward to walk this road with you

Regards from

Andrea, Robert and Martijn