20 September 2019 – Momentum Metropolitan Holdings was honoured to receive the Inspiring Leadership award at the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) Beyond Painting Classrooms (BPC) conference held in Johannesburg recently. The recognition highlights the company’s commitment to harnessing strong leadership that can inspire people to do more to effect real change in communities that need it most.
It starts at the top, where tangible and measurable investments are made towards driving CSI initiatives that deliver beyond minimum reporting requirements. In this way, volunteerism acts as the steady heartbeat of the CSI engine within Momentum Metropolitan Holdings.
“We’ve seen over the years how volunteerism can personally influence the volunteers themselves in a positive way or build their social consciousness through community work. In the time of flux in which we find ourselves as a country, the benefit of personal investment, be it time or resources, can go a long way towards positively impacting people’s lives,” says Charlene Lackay, CSI Manager Momentum Metropolitan Holdings.
This investment of time and resources at a company-wide level focuses mainly on youth employability and enabling the sustainable earning potential of South Africa’s young talent through employment programmes and job placement – essentially covering the entire employability journey.
One volunteer initiative that caught the eye of the judges was THE CUBE, where the company’s employees provided their expertise to four NPOs in youth development – DAKTARI Bush School & Wildlife Orphanage, Life 4 U Foundation, The Character Company, and Vuka Skhokho: The Jermaine Lungile Schmidt Foundation. Corporate volunteers may often conceptualise creative solutions to the unique business problems of an NPO, but in THE CUBE NPOs were invited to assess and selected the solution that they thought was most relevant and implementable.
Conferences like BPC are critical platforms to share knowledge, and network with existing and potential partners. The bi-annual BPC Conference, for example, brought together leaders in corporate social investment and employee volunteering from the corporate sector, non-profit sector and other relevant organisations, many with years of local and international experience in the development field.
The programme, which included a mix of plenary sessions, panel discussions and debates, breakaways and Q&A opportunities, enabled the sharing of key insights, with delegates representing NPOs, government, schools, institutions of higher learning as well as corporates, marketing and communication specialists and social and ethics committee members.
