Finalists
For the past five years, the Outreach Foundation has offered an after-school drama programme for young learners and the youth in Hillbrow, in partnership with Tswelopele Frail Care Centre and Johannesburg Society for the blind. It has run as an intergenerational programme on themes like identity, belonging, cultural beliefs and generational curses that has inspired intergenerational knowledge sharing. After suspending the programme, Letters to You and Me, the 5th anniversary of our intergenerational programme, was developed as a digital storytelling training programme and a training manual, based on Gcebile Dlamini’s five years of engaging intergenerational theatre-making practice. Letters To You and Me, the 2020 iteration of the intergenerational project, was also co-funded by the International Relief Fund of the German Federal Foreign Office, the Goethe-Institut, and other partners.
Originally a physically interactive music project before the pandemic, the Marimba Jam project made the transition to becoming an eight-week online programme, offering an alternative to the usual marimba band classes. Aware of the challenge of access to a marimba instrument by students, the programme (titled #LockdownJam) offered innovative ways to learn music and how to DIY instruments with material available in their homes. The programme culminated in a mass item, which involved every student recording their individual part to a song and putting it all together in a music video, positively affecting the mental health of students.
Masks4Good was formed by the Museum Store Africa founder and communities to produce and distribute hand-made masks before it was made mandatory. Built on a pay-it-forward principle, for each mask purchased, one was distributed to communities in need for free. It was an urgent response to the hard lockdown’s impact on 48 small creative and design enterprises that lost income as a result of the Javett Art Centre (where art, design and craft are sold) being forced to close.