Born into a philanthropic family, Ruth Lewin fondly remembers collecting money for the blind – one of her parents many charitable endeavours. It would come as no surprise that Discovery’s Head of Corporate Sustainability was recently appointed to the respected position of world president of the global volunteerism body, at the International Association of Volunteer Effort (IAVE). Lewin told BizNews editor Jackie Cameron about this exciting new role, what it means for Discovery and how her significant career of helping others – which included a stint as regional manager for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission – led her to her latest challenge. – Jarryd Neves
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I’m Jackie Cameron for BizNews. With me is Discovery’s Head of Corporate Sustainability, Ruth Lewin, who has recently been appointed to the prestigious position of world president of the global volunteerism body, for the US based International Association of Volunteer Effort. Ruth, congratulations. What does the International Association of Volunteer Effort Organisation do? How did your appointment come about?
Thanks, Jackie. It’s known as IAVE. That’s the acronym. It’s been in existence for about 50 years now, actually. Its main purpose is to promote, to strengthen and to celebrate the development of volunteering worldwide. It has four key functions. That of convening volunteer leaders, of advocacy, of knowledge, development and network development.
My association with IAVE started about five years ago, when Discovery joined their corporate volunteering programme. It’s been very exciting, particularly as I’m the first African world president and the first actually, from the global south, since 1988. So there’s been a fair amount of excitement about my representing the global south and, of course, the African continent.
This is a remarkable achievement. What does it mean for Discovery?
I think that what it does is it gives us the opportunity to really showcase the amazing corporate volunteering that our employees have been engaged in for many years. I joined Discovery in 2004, and it was then that we – in a more structured way – launched an employee volunteer programme within Discovery. We realised that the success of the business has largely been attributed to the kinds of people we have.
Our thinking was, ‘how do we transfer the kind of skills that sit within a business – that’s made the business so successful – into broader society?’ I think it really talks to our philosophy as a business that we don’t see ourselves as purely providing products and services to our members, but that we actually are a business fully entrenched in broader society. Therefore, we need to be taking very seriously the kinds of socio-economic challenges that exist and how we position ourselves to contribute towards the eradication of those challenges.
How do you see this volunteerism changing?
I think that what Covid has really shown us is that actually, as a global world, we are really so connected. There are amazing opportunities for us to collaborate much more, not only across sectors, not only within our country – which is so critical – but actually globally. I see this relationship with IAVE certainly giving us that opportunity already. We have a platform as a global business where we are connected to our other businesses in other parts of the world, in so many countries.
I think that what Covid has really shown us is that actually, as a global world, we are really so connected.
I think IAVE gives us this opportunity. My role certainly, gives us the opportunity to start bringing everyone together and to really build a movement of volunteers in a very strategic way where we are truly addressing the agenda certainly that the United Nations has set in terms of the Sustainable Development Goals 2030. So I think that is really the opportunity that we have and it’s the opportunity that we have to grasp now. While everyone is thinking about what is our role both as individuals and as collectives within our society broadly.
Were there specific projects that caught the attention of the IAVE panelists when you were nominated for this position of world president?
So I guess the Discovery approach to volunteerism has been quite interesting. We’re not in any way discounting the importance of painting wards and painting schools, etc. Those are really important. But we believe if we are going to invest in social programmes, we must do it firstly alongside communities, and really hear from communities what their needs are. Not go in as a corporate, thinking that we have all the resources and impose our solutions. I think that’s the first issue.
Secondly, it’s about how we fundamentally and quite systematically address the issues. So one of the examples which we are really excited about – alongside a whole host of other initiatives – was a project that we launched with the City of Johannesburg about five years ago, particularly in one community – looking at Orange Farm as a community – which is an extremely depressed community, 40km from Johannesburg.
We did a little baseline study to understand what were the key issues there, before just embarking upon providing solutions. We found that there were a couple of issues which were kind of key to being resolved for that community. The one was that there was a high level of youth unemployment. The second issue was the issue of health and the kind of diseases of lifestyle which were so prominent, I think, in many poor communities – in many communities – but particularly Orange Farm.
We believe that if we are going to invest in social programmes, we must do it alongside communities and really hear from communities what their needs are.
The third was related to enterprises and how one can build small enterprises within those communities. But building on the youth unemployment problem that exists. So we launched this programme with a skills development centre. We took on board – we didn’t go in as implementers – but we took on board, whichever organisations were in existence and what facilities were there. We basically facilitated the training of young people, but with the aim of giving them jobs at the end of the day or assisting them – facilitating access to jobs.
We were fairly successful through our partnership with the City of Johannesburg, where many of these young people were either set up into small businesses where they could run a plumbing or an electrical business, or were actually employed in the respective enterprises of the city.
Then once they had set up a little business of their own, we then utilised our enterprise development programme, to look at how that could invest in incubators, in Orange Farm. So the programme has grown where, what typically happens in a corporate is that you take on one NGO and you support it or you take on one issue and you support it.
Here, we took on multiple issues with multiple partnerships – which included ABSA, the City of Johannesburg, the Netherlands Embassy, and all the NGOs working in a particular field in Orange Farm. So it was a really nice example of how you could address a couple of issues – all affecting the same people – with good coordination and good collaboration. I think that really interested IAVE, how corporates could potentially bring their own resources into something and systemically try and change what exists there.
The IAVE executive director, Nichole Cirillo, described you as a leader for the complexities and opportunities we face today. Was that a project that required multiple committees to decide how to go ahead or how did you unravel those complexities?
I think when you have partners, you always have to take into account their constraints. I suppose, with it comes the support that they could give. But it’s always difficult when one’s working with the government, because you’ve got to go through a whole host of processes. You know, we work very differently in the corporate world where you’ve got a budget and you are able to move fairly quickly.
So we learned that if we wanted to be successful and in our new approach, we’ve got to take all our partners along with us. I think similarly, if you’re wanting to work in communities like these, we are not going to be there in ad infinitum.
I think Covid has added a whole new dynamic to how one works in these communities. All our work is now virtual. Where we had people on the ground, we can’t do that any longer.
So it was very important for us to set up the right structures to ensure that the community gets ownership – or the NGOs, the civil society with whom we are working – get ownership of these programmes, so that after five years we can move on – having learned a lot from that process – into another community which has similar kind of challenges and roll out a programme.
So, yes, we learned a lot. We made many mistakes. I don’t think by any means we can say that we’ve been absolutely successful, in being able to get community ownership of it in the way that we would have liked to have seen it. But these are very complex issues we’re dealing with. I think Covid has added a whole new dynamic to how one works in these communities. All our work is now virtual. Where we’ve actually had people on the ground, we can’t do that any longer. Well, certainly for now.
Very interesting figure in your financial reports, saying that 30% of Discovery staff are engaged in volunteer activities. That’s a huge number of staff members. What’s your advice to other corporates who want to encourage their own staff to get engaged in the greater good?
So this is a very exciting number for us because the global statistic is 18% of employees are generally engaged. So we are by far exceeding it. We don’t believe that it’s the number where we want to be at. We want to be closer to the 70% mark. I think the way one does this, when you have an employee value proposition, which looks at the entire experience of an employee within an organisation – of which employee volunteerism is one essential part – then I think you are addressing the issue of engagement in quite a holistic way.
So, around incentivising employees for being engaged. Allowing employees to go out, giving them time off by the employer, to actually do this kind of work, and for them to understand that it’s actually a mutually beneficial relationship. It isn’t as if we are going into communities as saviours. They are also learning. Very often, these employees come from the very areas in which we are working.
The global statistic is 18% of employees are generally engaged. We are by far exceeding it.
So, it’s also about showing that the business is cognisant of where you come from, what your challenges are, and how we are prepared to contribute towards eliminating some of those challenges. So I think a lot of loyalty comes from it. There’s feedback into the business about what the needs are out there. It also informs ,ultimately, on product design and so on. So there are a lot of benefits that can be derived from this kind of activity.
I think we’ve also seen that – largely in Discovery – there are millennials employed. Millennials are really wanting to get involved in these kinds of social issues. It’s something that has come up certainly in the surveys that we’ve run within the business. So it’s also about meeting the needs of our employees. It’s not just about meeting either community’s needs or a company’s needs. It’s also about what employees are telling us they would like to be engaged in.
Is this why you’ve got such a diverse range of projects? I see here that you have a project aimed at helping young girls. You’ve got PPE. Perhaps you could just tell us a bit more about the range of projects your staff are involved in and how they got to those choices. I mean, presumably you don’t accept all ideas. How do you filter them?
It’s a very difficult one, because we are faced very often with not wanting to kill the spirit of volunteerism. But we also understand that we want to make an impact. So we need to guide as far as we can. So largely our focus would be on health related projects, much like our corporate social investment programmes – through the Discovery Fund and the Discovery Foundation – are directed towards the public health system and the strengthening in particular of the public health system.
For example, we allow our business units to determine which projects they would like to support, as long as it fits within the broad guidelines that we’ve laid down. As for PPE – this year during Covid – really kind of showed the agility and flexibility that our programme has, which is also important because you don’t want to be so static that you are unable to respond to an urgent need.
What we found that our agility allowed us to very quickly respond – and respond outside of what we would do from a financial point of view. So with PPE – I think it was our Eastern Cape office – they produced a whole host of masks. Similarly, we fund from the Discovery Fund – which is one of our CSI platforms – we fund over 40 NGOs in a multi-year relationship and they are all health clinics and health facilities around the country.
We allow our business units to determine which projects they would like to support, as long as it fits within the broad guidelines that we’ve laid down.
But we realised that a lot of the support was going to them for delivering services. But what about the staff in those offices? So from our own budgets – not the CSI budgets – from our operational budgets, we actually were able to provide masks, for example, to the staff working in these facilities.
By the same token, it dawned on us that our healthy company provides counselling services to employee members. So we said, ‘but what about all these NGOs working in rural areas where they don’t have access to these resources?’ We were then able to get our employees who work in the healthy company who are counsellors to provide counselling sessions for staff, which was really appreciated by these NGOs.
 You may know that NGOs have just enough money to deliver on the services. So being able to provide these additional bits of support meant a lot to them. Also to them, I think – and judging from the responses we got – they felt that we were being quite proactive as a funder and they were really appreciative of that.
Tell us about the influences in your work. What drove you to focus on social impact work and how did you turn this into a career?
A large part of my working life – since the late 70s/early 80s, I suppose – I spent working in communities. I come from a family where my parents were both teachers, but were very active community members. My father started a civic association and worked very actively to ensure that libraries were built in areas where none existed. A swimming pool was built.
I don’t know if you know any of that generation of people, but they were not just teachers in communities. They were also the people who wrote the letters for people who couldn’t write. The shopkeeper who wasn’t allowed to operate because he was Indian in a coloured area. So representing those individuals or working for the South African – my father was one of the founding members of the League of Friends of the Blind. So as a child, I remember having to stand with these collection boxes that filled our lounge and it was all over.
I come from a family where my parents were both teachers, but were very active community members.
We all had to stand on the road and collect on a particular day for the blind, among others. So that was very much the kind of home that I grew up in. So getting involved in community work, which is what I did eventually in my life – my working life – was almost something that came naturally. That I did full-time, eventually, from about 1983. I was employed full-time doing work with youth, women, children on all kinds of issues until our democracy in 1994, when I formally then worked in government.
From there I was recruited into discovery in 2004. I worked for a while with a couple of places. I started out in 1994 when Ebrahim Rasool was the MEC for Health and Social Services in the Western Cape. I was head of his office. So that was my first bit of work. Then I was the regional manager for the Western and Northern Cape for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, between 1996 and 1998. When I moved up to Pretoria, my husband was a civil servant. Then thereafter, I joined the IEC and I worked a bit in ICASA, the regulator for telecoms and broadcasting. From there I was recruited to Discovery.
Ruth, what does your role as world president entail? What are you going to be doing now? Will you still have time for your work at Discovery?
I suppose because it’s a global organisation – headquartered in Washington, DC – a large part of my work starts from about three or four o’clock in the afternoon. I chair the board of thirteen members for IAVE. It’s a four-year term currently. One of the key things is how do we speed up our work and become a lot more strategic in terms of the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.
We’re going to be doing a strategic review soon. So that’s the role that I would play in guiding – alongside my fellow board members – the processes of being a lot more strategic and meeting the needs of our global world. The board has a very good representation of all the regions of the world. So it’s easy to be able to tap into everyone else’s knowledge. It isn’t as if I’m sitting with all the knowledge. I possibly can’t have that. So it’s a very privileged position to be in, working alongside other colleagues who have done this work also for many years.
What’s your vision for Discovery’s corporate sustainability initiatives?Â
Well, I think we’d really like to grow our staff engagement much more than what it is currently. Secondly, we would really like to team up with our global partners – Vitality in the UK, Ping An Health in China – and really have a movement across all our businesses that works towards a common goal. So that will be a big gain for us if we are able to expand our involvement beyond South Africa.
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