Page 111 - SCAT Rural Voice II - 35 Stories for 35 Years

opportunities and our job was just to explore those opportunities. That is when I became curious and started knocking at governmental department doors looking for opportunities to push back the frontiers of poverty. I was then introduced to the idea of having an Advice Office by someone from the Department of Social Development after he noticed my interest in getting involved in community development and changing the lives of our community members.
We now have a Youth Centre where forty community youths are encouraged to develop their potential. We also introduce the youth to entrepreneurial opportunities like food security plots and car washes. We researched what might have caused problems like the high unemployment rate, youth pregnancy and a lack of equal opportunities. We asked why the very problems we encountered in the apartheid regime still persisted now in the community. The results of our research found that our local government is uncaring and there is no community participation in our local municipality. The people of Pampierstad were not involved in community development and the youth know absolutely nothing about local government programmes.
We fortunately received funding from Social Change Assistance Trust (SCAT) to help us address community problems. SCAT also organised capacity building workshops for us as an empowerment initiative. In one of the workshops facilitated by SCAT, one presenter motivated us by saying, “there is wealth in every poor community”. Our task as an LDA was to identify that wealth. That inspired us so much and we realised that the youth in our community had a lot of potential waiting to be released. We then called a community meeting and informed the community about the funding we received from SCAT and what we could do to assist their self-sustainable projects with that funding. I am happy to report that we have a group of youths who have released a CD through our assistance.
Thuso Advice Centre also started a Youth Centre which can sustain itself with programmes like a food gardening project. There is also a group of DJs who are entertaining people at social events for a minimal fee. Through the Advice Centre intervention, the crime rate has drastically gone down because the community have been urged to start street committees to combat crime. We as the Advice Office have also started the Men’s Forum in the community as we believe if there is order in the home, half the battle is won. We believe that the Advice Office achieves so much with constant dialogue, meetings and feedback from the community. We plan to strengthen our partnership with SCAT as they have shown beyond reasonable doubt that they really care about community development. We also need to embark on a sustainable local economic development project by engaging constantly with other government institutions.
Now I feel that there is light at the end of the tunnel as more youth are involved in community development projects. There is this spirit of hope and active citizenship, allowing youth to embrace and adopt my generation’s ANC “each one teach one strategy”. This means if you know- teach, if you don’t know- learn. The community have learned to help each other to oppose the ill treatment at the mine. Now our community’s voices are being heard and engaged youth who are activists are promoting access to justice and community development with us at Thuso Advice Centre.
YOUTH
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