A Growing Thing and Khulisa – The Pilot Workshop
For over a year we have been planning a collaborative outreach project with a grassroots-based NGO in South Africa called Khulisa Social Solutions based on our film. December 2018 we were able to implement an initial pilot workshop in Johannesburg with young women from a local township, Kliptown, which was very successful.
Khulisa focuses its work on empowering people who face discrimination on a daily basis. The non-profit works as a catalyst to bring together marginalized communities with the public and NGO sectors to design and implement viable solutions based on current greatest need. Khulisa works with an average of 250,000 people per annum from disenfranchised communities of the townships of South Africa (via schools, community centers, prisons).
In preparing for a community intervention, Khulisas’s first step is always to listen to members of the socially and economically traumatized communities. By inviting those affected by injustices to speak up, to articulate their experiences, we can better understand their aspirations and limitations. In this way, trust and respect become the platform we build on for community dialogue and needs-based interventions.
In collaboration with Khulisa, our documentary A GROWING THING becomes a tool which speaks to the marginalized communities whose stories are in many ways similar to the women of our film. During our first workshop with Khulisa in December 2018, we noticed that this identification moves the audiences from these communities to share traumatic and often untold stories from their own lives. In the structured dialogue of an all-day, film-based workshop, the participants find great community and relief. At the same time, the trained workshop leaders are able to gather facts and specific needs from these conversations which provide crucial information about which interventions are most needed. As a follow-up, Khulisa liaises with local partner organizations (mentor projects, AIDS and health crisis support, job training, etc.) to bring these skills and workshops to the community. These local organizations can design their support to meet the specific needs of each group anew.
Khulisa will work with its own trained workshop leaders to develop a booklet upon which these day-long workshops can be based. In addition, these trained leaders will then disseminate their knowledge through teacher workshops to enable a multiplication of workshops through the extended Khulisa network across South Africa.
Khulisa has over twenty years experience in the field and has developed measurable and impact-driven outcomes which can be articulated into data gathering systems. These outcomes are assessed on a frequent and regular basis to assure high-impact results on their projects.
Khulisa also has partnerships abroad (Khulisa UK and Khulisa Australia). Once the South Africa workshops are underway, we will explore collaborating with these affiliates to bring the film to disenfranchised communities in these additional countriesT