The Black Professional Scholarship Fund will be hosting a skills-building workshop for university students in Sandton.
The scholarship fund was created in 2014 by young black professionals who wanted to provide gifted but disadvantaged youths with the opportunity to get a tertiary education.
The group created a stokvel-like scholarship fund whereby they would contribute a portion of their salary to fund the education of young students. Tafadzwa Makombe, the head of the Growing Tomorrow’s Leaders Workshops said the motto of the scholarship fund was, ‘Educating today’s youth and growing tomorrow’s leaders’.
“We realised that we were addressing the first part of this statement [motto] but not the second part so we wanted to create these workshops to help develop the soft skills that young people might not learn in university,” said Makombe.
The first workshop was hosted last year in June. The upcoming workshop will be hosted on 28 September at Investec in Sandton.
Makombe said they have received great feedback from the workshops they have already hosted and they look forward to hosting more in the future. “We have about five topics that we discuss in the workshops. I think they [students] love hearing from personal experiences and they are able to practise a lot of the skills that we discuss.”
Some of the topics covered in the workshops include public speaking, networking, budgeting, time management and mental health.
While the workshops have focused on smaller groups, Makombe hoped that they would be able to expand them in the future. She added that they also hoped to host the workshops at universities to make them more accessible to young people.
Makombe added that they were beginning to look for more corporate sponsorship and hoped to encourage more people to get involved in the initiative.
Details: Black Professional Scholarship Fund gtl@bpsf.co.za
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