Street bookseller project receives national recognition
The Booksellers of Mzansi bookselling project received national recognition in Johannesburg recently.
MOST homeless people want to work and be financially independent in a dignified way, and begging or stealing are not the preferred options, says Raymond Perrier of the Denis Hurley Centre (DHC).
Perrier said the centre’s PaperMoney project, aimed at turning beggars into newspaper vendors, in partnership with Urban Lime, evolved a year ago into homeless people selling second-hand books, supported by Hashtag Books, The Booksellers of Mzansi project.
The centre has 10 regular sellers who make enough money – on average R2 000 per month – to get off the streets and into shelters or even their own rooms. Perrier said a number of venues around Durban have been very supportive of the initiative, including the ICC, Playhouse, KZNPO, festivals, churches and malls.
“We now have a plan to scale up by creating mobile bookshops in specially adapted shopping trollies. Our booksellers could get to many more places and offer quality well-priced books to the many thousands of people who want to read but cannot afford new books. We submitted our plan to the SAB Foundation Social Innovation Awards and were thrilled to be chosen as one of the 20 finalists out of 2,000 applicants, and the only KZN finalist!” said Perrier.
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“We have to wait for a few weeks to find out if we have won, but already we have learnt a lot from preparing our submission and from the two-day business skills workshop that preceded the pitch. Our team was not just myself and Stuart Talbot, but also two of our best booksellers, Pat Khumalo and Richard Nzima. You can imagine the look on their faces when these two guys who had been sleeping on the streets were shown their rooms at the Sandton Hilton!” he said.
Perrier said the project could empower more sellers if they had more venues. Let the centre know if you can host booksellers by emailing: raymond@denishurleycentre.org.
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