Afrika Tikkun has played a very special hand in looking after the poorest of our nation. Over the 25 years it has been around, the non-profit has put systems in place to ensure its funding goes as far as it can. One thing it can guarantee is efficient delivery, says its CEO Marc Lubner. He told BizNews founder Alec Hogg that that there is a worrying picture Alec Hogg why corporates and government need to collaborate to create change. In the touching interview, Lubner highlighted the need for a more open economy and for taxes to be used to support those in need. With a foothold in the townships, Lubner says he needs all the help he can get to deliver ‘that last mile’. – Nadim Nyker
Alec Hogg: Well, it’s a very warm welcome to Marc Lubner of Afrika Tikkun. How long has Afrika Tikkun been going for?
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Marc Lubner: Afrika Tikkun has been in operation now for 25 years. We celebrated our 25th year. Started originally by my late father, Bertie, and the then chief Rabbi also now unfortunately late, Chief Rabbi Harris. The concept really was to try and say, could we consolidate the efforts of the Jewish community working in township environments?
Problem, unfortunately, is, you know, every Jewish charity is run by somebody who themselves ought to be captain of the ship. So that didn’t work well. Consolidating the efforts of all the various community initiatives and Tikkun started originally with a variety of different projects, helping elderly people rebuild homes in Alex, a feeding scheme in Orange Farm and the likes. I’ve been with Tikkun now 16 years. I joined, anticipating that I would be for a year or two, three at the most kind of story, just bringing in some sort of professional management structures and stuff.
And I fell in love with the spirit of youth in our townships, which I’m still in love with, quite frankly, today. In awe of the young people living in township environments and the desire not to be recipients of social grants, that is in fact to get career parts for themselves.
Over the years we developed to other entities. One called Afrika Tikkun Services, which focuses on skills training, work experience programmes, learnerships and operates as a enterprise development firm. And the other is Afrika Tikkun Investments, which is a private equity black economic empowerment investor using the dividend stream to help fund the charity. The three components, as it were, three entities, all form an initiative called Cradle to Career.
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So our development arm, the charity arm, looks after the development of children from the age of about two to the age of about 19. The African services business takes kids from the age of about 20 into 25 years of age.
And then the private equity arm looks to take up stakes in companies where not only do we look for a dividend out of those businesses to fund the charity, but to influence those companies to employ from this pool that we have developed. So we are offering an economic benefit that is very tangible, not just a Black Economic Empowerment tick box exercise.
And during Covid-19 the demand on your resources must have rocketed?
ML: We are at our heart a child and youth development organisation. Our end game plan is to get kids into career path. That’s pretty much what we do all day, every day as a motive for getting up every morning.
We have about 20,000 children and youth that come to our senses every day. Many of them receiving between two and four meals during the course of the day. And this has been ongoing. We make over 1.8-million meals. In fact, in the course of the year, using veggie gardens, industrial kitchens. But now we could no longer feed these kids because they’re not able to come to our centers.
So we had two responsibilities, one we had to carry on with their education. So we moved pretty much in the space of three weeks, four weeks online and found various ways to provide support of an educational nature. And then we had to feed these kids. But bear in mind, these kids go back home, 20,000, get back to their shack environments with families who are also in lockdown.
So we had to expand our feeding initiatives. We did so looking after about 70,000 families with a month’s supply of food. By working through existing community structures. And this is really important. There were so many goodwill initiatives that I saw arise [and] no disrespected meant, many of them are not sustainable.
By working through the existing structures that were in place before Covid struck, we empowered the structures and in fact help them to strengthen their ties within the local community. Ensuring that the right food went to the right individuals who were most desperately in need. And we prevented things like resale of food products.
We prevented double-dipping and issues like that. So it’s still a massive challenge. This whole issue of food security, we are working with the Minister of Social Development on more sustainable programmes, growing programmes.
We are running a number of soup kitchens and are learning how soup kitchens can potentially be run commercially and trying to find ways to look at this issue of food security. But with a degree of urgency. Absolutely.
And not just necessarily depend on handouts. The Solly Krok initiative, the keep the wolf from the door initiative was really designed to offer an emergency relief support, but at the same time also to start looking at more long-term sustainable partnerships with organisations [who] do grow vegetables to scale within township environments.
Solly Krok’s initiative with Afrika Tikkun
The Solly Krok story is interesting. Just to unpack that a little for us,how it all came together and indeed why he came to partner with Afrika Tikkun?
ML: Solly turned 91, spoke to Adrian Gore from Discovery. And Adrian challenged him to walk 91 kilometres to celebrate his birthday. For a man who had never been to gym and not done any exercise. So Solly undertook the challenge and Solly’s an inimitable character. So, he determined that he would walk not only 91 kilometres, in fact he walked 100, but that he would do so, such that he could ask people to support through funding the Food Security Initiative with Afrika Tikkun and an organisation, Siyakhana [with] Mike Rudolph, who, as I mentioned, is involved in growing programmes.
Solly then went and contacted his networks globally to raise as his target 101-million rand. Today, he’s raised a couple of million. And we’ve got a number of really interesting initiatives, such as asking Discovery members. If 500,000 vitality members, and many of them accumulate rewards, which they don’t necessarily cash in. I’m prime candidate. And if we were given a prompt to cash those rewards in, you can do the numbers, 200,000 members, each cashed in 100 rand. That’s 20-million rand. And by taking that money, AfriKa Tikkun is then able to go to the Minister of Social Development and say, would you match in some manner where government would say fund the setting up of soup kitchens, would pay the wages for soup kitchen practitioners, and we would help then fund the food supplies?
So it is a campaign that we’re right in the midst of at the moment. We’re hoping to expand to other organisations that run reward programmes where members participate. The one thing we can do [that] the government can’t and many corporates, respectfully, equally can’t. We can deliver, Alec, that last mile because we are resident in these towns and communities. Our sites or in the communities, our 600 odd staff. Our employees are employed from within the community. We really are able to distribute food wisely to those who are most in need. And that’s a very important component to all of this.
The real picture
And what’s it like in the townships that you visit?
ML: Alec, tough! I drove through Alex township two weeks ago and I’m usually, as I say, I have 16 odd years in one or other community centers in the townships, at least once a month. Two weeks ago I went into Alex township, and I had to take a detour through the ‘poor side’ of Alex. I’ve never experienced kids running up to the car door before and knocking on the window begging for food.
I watched elderly people climbing on garbage heaps that were the size of two-storey houses, practically looking for scraps. I’ve never seen that before. So there is a growing, I believe, sense of desperation. When a community doesn’t know what the future holds. it becomes relatively unstable. I anticipate there are going to be a lot more service delivery and food riots, quite frankly, which is very, very unsettling.
I don’t want to sound like I’m being overly dramatic, but you can’t ask people to be contained in these overpopulated environments. This is like Alex or Diepsloot and not be concerned about where they’re going to go to to actually feed themselves. They are no mass feeding schemes, certainly not like they were at the start of Covid. Not to the same degree. I mean, still a number of organisations like Tikkun that are in fact continuing to feed, but not in the numbers that we were able to previously. And I have real concerns.
Afrika Tikkun’s solution
So what’s your suggestion?
ML: Collaboration. We really can. By the way, this country has, first and foremost, enough funds available. We’ve all been whacked really hard, I appreciate with the lockdown in a number of initiatives, quite frankly. I just don’t understand the taxes that have been lost. It could have been spent on food security, for argument’s sake, by allowing at least regulated liquor sales. I just don’t, just don’t get it.
I mean, taxes would have paid for more than enough hospital beds, but be that as it may. My sense is that if government is prepared to work with civil society and civil society can co-opt corporate sectors to work in collaboration, because I think that there’s huge trust deficits between the corporate sector and government at the moment and civil society can help bridge that. My sense is we can make a material difference. We really can move the needle.
Corporates have got to stop doing their own thing. 9.5-billion rand of CSI spend alone before enterprise development. But of that, nine and a half billion of CSI spend, over five and a half billion is spent by corporates on their own in-house programmes.
Let that money flow to civil society who work on the ground. Let civil society be empowered by governments who aren’t able to run projects on the ground the way civil society can. If the parties can get round the table, my belief is we really can make a material difference. And very quickly, corporate input for argument’s sake, on how to be more creative and how to be more entrepreneurial – government, then backing on those entrepreneurial initiatives and civil society filling in the gaps.
