The Johannesburg Children’s Home 64 Reasons Book Club launch
JOHANNESBURG – The Johannesburg Children's Home launches its pilot workplace-integrated social project aimed at enhancing skills, employability and allowing children to create opportunities for self-employment, post-care.
The Johannesburg Children’s Home‘s (JCH) social enterprises launched its 64 Reasons Book Club on September 3 at 10:30 at its Westcott Hall, in Observatory.
The reason behind this launch was to announce a pilot workplace-integrated social-enterprise project through the Johannesburg Children’s Home’s Siya Sebenza skills programme, offering IT and related e-commerce digital skills. This pilot project is aimed at older children who will be exiting the home in the next year or two to enhance their employability and create opportunities for self-employment, post-care.
The primary business goal is to set up a sustainable e-commerce website that would enable the social enterprises to sell books and other products on existing known e-commerce platforms, in order to generate consistent revenue. The JCH is grateful for the technical support for this project from Cymode Software Development.
The pilot will start with eight children, three male and five female, over the age of 17. Of these children, five are in school and three in college – half of the group have IT skills and all of them have a keen interest in business and entrepreneurship. The children will attend a weekly class after hours over a period of three months, during which time they will learn basic skills required to run an on-line ‘side hustle’ from the current JCH IT tutor.
The 64 Reasons Book Club is a monthly event held on the first Friday of each month and is run in collaboration with local authors. It took off with guest speaker Cynthia Stimpel, former SAA employee and whistleblower and now author of Hijackers on Board. Attendees were treated to in-depth insights and reflections from the author on this must-read book.
A book-signing event with Cynthia Stimpel also took place on Saturday at Thrift Up, where a percentage of the sale of books on both days, went toward the project. The JCH children from the music group rendered entertainment for the day.
The 64 Reasons Book Club has a variety of options for the community to participate in through hosting book club meetings, buying book vouchers or supporting book pop-up sales at the Westcott Hall or Thrift Up in Norwood. All proceeds from sale of books contribute to the e-commerce project for the children.
A review and feedback of the pilot project will be done in the first week of December.
For more information contact se@jch.org.za .
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