Page 8 - Rural Voice III - Responding to a Pandemic

JoannE harding EXECutivE dirECtor
INTRODUCTION
A LOCAL RESPONSE TO A GLOBAL PANDEMIC
By Joanne Harding
Two weeks before President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that South Africa was about to go into full lockdown, the SCAT staff discussed protocols for working in the face of a pandemic. While we were discussing social distancing and sanitisers for the office, epidemiologists and mathematicians were trying to work out the trajectory of this virus for South Africa. Since then our world has changed completely and we mostly see each other on screens. While working from home we try and coordinate our response to COVID-19, and continue to provide our usual support to our grantees.
scaT’s approach
SCAT is an intermediary grant maker which means that we straddle the world between being a fundraiser and a funder. We have a small endowment allowing us to cover some core costs, be creative and innovative, but mostly we raise funds to support and strengthen the capacity of 30 rural community organisations across the Eastern, Western and Northern Cape provinces. Our primary aim is to ensure access to justice, gender equality and food security. The people served by our grantees are the most vulnerable, mostly women and often pensioners and the disabled. People in rural areas are 40% more likely to be unemployed and households are more likely to be headed by women. Employment is mostly in sectors hard hit during COVID including agriculture, tourism and work in households.
On the night that President Ramaphosa told us that we would be going into full lockdown I sent a message to our trustee group and asked them to approve funds from our reserves to distribute to grantees. We realised we had to act quickly to get food and sanitation products out to the most vulnerable. Within 20 hours, 30 grantees had received communication about the additional grant, had acknowledged this and the funds were in their bank accounts. Our grantees had three days to respond before we stepped into the unknown. We set up a WhatsApp group to distribute accurate information, and quickly the pictures started coming in of how our grantees were responding to ensure people had some protection during this time. The relationship of trust that we have built up with our grantees over years of working together allowed us to give additional funds without hesitation.
funder supporT
Immediately after the announcement of the lockdown we received communication from funders asking how they could be of support and where we needed flexibility. We had “gone into lockdown without a safety net” said David Harrison of the DG Murray Trust in an email where he made an offer of a grant for food to SCAT grantees. This
8
RURAL VOICE III: RESPONDING TO A PANDEMIC