Rites of Passage Programme

Finding Gifts Workshop 

We had our first workshop of the year with the young adults in our Rites of Passage Programme. Using creative tools and a story circle process, participants in the programme worked with the challenges they have identified in their own lives. They began to search for the gifts within these challenges, the gifts they bring to the world. 

In the workshop participants spoke about how hard it is to identify gifts in themselves but after several processes they began to name beautiful gifts. They identified how in hard situations they have strength, persistence and care for others. For some letting go was a gift, for others it is being open to connecting with people deeply. 

While it may be easier to have other people tell you what your gifts are, finding these gifts ourselves enables us to own them and live into them more fully. As they work with their gifts more and more they will begin to work with the visions they have for their own lives.

This vulture feather was our talking piece during the story circle

Sandile adding to his ongoing storytelling project

Using free writing to explore challenges and gifts

Preparing lunch together

Time to catch up and rest after a busy morning

Board Meeting and Collective Visioning

Our positive revolution! Exploring the way forward by looking at what breathes life into .... our work, our vision, our board?

Strategic Board Meeting 27 January 2013.

Exploring our vision for the organization.

Jars for appreciating what each person brings. In honour of the mischievous two year old spirit the organization
personifies, we had to have a little candy in the jars too.

Gillian Wilton creating her vision.

Exploring our vision for the community! A community that is passion based. A community symbolized by the lotus flower, a beautiful flower that grows only in mud...

What breathes life into the board? laughter, relationship, looking forward together.

Appreciative Inquiry into I Am Somebody! Appreciative inquiry is a tool for change work that is based on the idea that knowing what we are doing right is often more important than knowing what we are doing wrong.

Celebrating!

A vision of our community from Board Member Tina Schouw "Sunflowers", she says, "are like people. They instinctively turn their faces to the sun. They mirror the possibility of the sun."

The Story Behind Ian Burgess-Simpson Pianos

Nestled in Muizenberg, next to the bridge on Beach Road, is the distributor for Kawai pianos in the Cape. We've decided to tell you this story because this is no ordinary business. 

Kyle Shepherd playing a Kawai piano at our event

In September we held an event with The Kyle Shepherd Trio to celebrate the incredible individuals who pledged monthly donations to I Am Somebody!.  The day before the performance was a busy one. Our amazing sound sponsors, Eastern Acoustics Pro Audio (www.eaternacoustics.co.za) spent the whole day setting up the sound system and returned early the next day to do sound check with the artists.  At the same time, a beautiful baby grand piano with incredible sound was carried into the Novalis Ubuntu Institute venue in separate parts and reassembled on stage. Ian Burgess-Simpson Pianos not only sponsored this piano, they covered delivery and pick up and spent two hours tuning the piano late on a Saturday afternoon.

We realized there has to be a good story behind a company that is willing to make such a generous donation. After the event I spent some time with Ruan Strauss Kalis, Sales & Marketing Consultant and pianist at Ian Burgess-Simpson Pianos. He started by showing me around the shop.  I’m a violinist, not a pianist, but as I was walking through the shop I wished I had become one because this would have been my dream come true.

A keyboard that will be refitted to a grand piano set.

Imagine room after room with pianos. A show room, repair room, storage room, a second show room filled with renovated pianos and even a warehouse... In the many rooms there are loose parts from soundboards to strings and keys. There are more pianos than you can imagine. From brand new pianos to old pianos, tiny little pianos the size of a microwave to the original upright pianos, baby and grand pianos.  The pianos all come from two of the three best brands in the world, they are Kawai and Steinway pianos.

Of course behind such a miraculous operation are people with a passion for music. I asked Ruan how he got to working in such an interesting job. When he was ten years old his neighbor's daughter played piano and, in Ruan’s words, “I knew quickly that this was what I wanted to do with my life.” And so it was, Ruan explained, that he temporarily lost his social life in order to practice, compose and perform.

Ruan Strauss Kalis playing the piano.

A decade later, Ruan spent four years completing the Performer's Diploma in Music at UCT. Further, he spent two years studying for an honours degree in performance at UCT, which he did not complete, while also running a fine music radio show and working as a waiter.  Then, with no teaching background to rely on, he took the courageous leap of starting up a very successful High School Music department. In the following years Ruan travelled and lived overseas and then returned to South Africa to work in various forms of marketing quality goods.  

It may come as no surprise that eventually Ruan found his way back to the piano. It had been years since he’d had a piano in his house, yet working for Ian Burgess-Simpson Pianos he not only has access to pianos, he has been encouraged to play. These days, Ruan performs frequently. He is also composing an opera and will be performing his compositions to Antjie Krog’s poetry at Die Woordfees later this year.

We believe that the businesses that sponsor I Am Somebody! are as much a part of our community as the individuals who offer their support. These businesses are built and powered by "Somebody’s" who are following their dreams and creating lives of purpose. Thank you Ruan Kalis and the staff of Ian Burgess-Simpson Pianos for your support of I Am Somebody! and for sharing this story with us. 

The mechanism of a Steinway piano, imported from Germany

A circle of grand and baby grand pianos at the store.

To learn more about Ian Burgess-Simpson Pianos visit www.kawai.co.za 

Special thanks to Ruan Kalis for sharing his story, to Toni Stuart and Kent Lingevelt for the photography. 

Mentorship Storytelling Event

Last Saturday we started direct community involvement in our Mentorship Programme through exploring what experiences people in our community have had with mentoring and being mentored. This was the first step towards incorporating the interests and needs of the community in a mentorship training that will be offered early next year. The stories that people shared will inform the training we develop.

This mentorship story circle also provided a once off opportunity for the participants from different parts of our community - from participants in our Rites of Passage programme to their parents to individuals from partner organizations - to share and witness one another's stories.

Eating lunch before sharing our stories

 

After sharing stories, people spoke about components of mentorship that appeared in the experiences shared. Many felt strongly that mentors should not identify those they mentor, it is the role of the mentee to identify someone they want to grow with. In the stories shared, mentors were sometimes family members and teachers and mentorship relationships were sometimes formal and informal. Nearly every person identified that a mentor must be able to listen deeply. Mentorship, some said, is largely about self reflection and about constantly learning from our experiences and reactions. 

 

We left the event with so many more questions... What does it mean to be somebody? What role does this play in mentorship? How can we together heal and build the fabric of our community through shared ownership and shared vision? 

 

What is your story? In your opinion, what are the most important components of mentorship? If you joined the training what would you like to explore? Keep your eye out for the next mentorship storytelling event in January. You do not need to join the training to come to the story circles.

The Power of Listening

 

  











What If Listening Could Change the World?
 
Nicole Le Roux, co-founder of I Am Somebody!, is one of 20 young social entrepreneurs recently honored by YouthActionNet as 2012 Laureate Global Fellows.  This blog post was written for YouthActionNet.

I think every person has at least one family or personal silence, something that is just not spoken about. My silence is racism. I’m a 26-year-old white woman from South Africa and my family was directly and indirectly involved in upholding the system of dehumanization, segregation, and violence my people coined apartheid.

I have long been afraid that if I break the silence around my family’s experience I will hurt the people I love most. But what if our stories could change the world? What if the answer to the problems we face – the answer to violence, HIV/AIDS, poverty, war – was as simple as encouraging others to speak their truth, listening deeply to better understand, and finding our own truth in that understanding? 

I came to know the power of listening when I spent three weeks with my grandfather five years ago. I blamed him for being racist, a view I had confirmed when I found out he was a high court judge during apartheid. Right before visiting him, a friend of mine challenged me to listen to my grandfather, rather than argue. Although my grandfather said many things that I deeply disagreed with, and although I doubted my choice many times, I simply asked more questions and tried to listen harder.

During those many days of listening I found something I didn’t expect to find, I found love. I saw my grandfather as if for the first time – his soft comforting hands, the smile wrinkles around his eyes, the way he contemplated everything. I saw his fear of not being loved and how it upheld his worldview because it made it harder for him to be wrong, to be vulnerable, and to connect with other people. Every idea I had about him being different from me was shattered when I listened to his stories because I couldn’t blame him for what I also embodied. Fear had driven my own denial of how I had internalized racism and embodied my privilege. I realized that I have to confront that fear and the only way to do so is by breaking the silence.

My grandfather taught me that the cost of our fears is great. Fear maintains the status quo, drives crowd mentality, stifles creativity, upholds war, increases class disparity, and enables gender inequality that perpetuates the spread of HIV/AIDS. Fear defends privilege and silences the underprivileged. My grandfather also taught me that we are not our fear. Through seeing him, I realized that we are more beautiful, vast, complex, and valuable than we could ever dream.  

Several years after this experience, I co-founded I Am Somebody!, an organization that seeks to build a reconciled South Africa whose people have learned from and transformed their history.  We use storytelling and youth development to build resilient, reconciled, and integrated communities. Through several interconnected long-term programs, we create the space for diverse young people, their families, mentors, and friends to confront their challenges, to speak their stories, and to be witnessed.

Through telling stories about the challenges they face, participants in our programs and members of our community are able to see themselves more clearly and support one another. They do this across cultures and classes and the lines of division apartheid created based on skin color.

One example is a female participant in our Young Adult Rites of Passage Program, who dropped out of school to become a caregiver in her family while she was still a child herself. Many of her internal and external challenges stem from inequalities created by apartheid. She says that sharing her story has been like looking into a mirror and seeing herself and her situation from new angles. The reflection in that mirror has helped her to make important life changes and take ownership of her future.

Another one of our participants had been engaged in programs in other organizations but never felt safe enough to speak. For months in our program, he also avoided sharing openly but then something changed. He drew a picture of abuse and chose to tell his story. As he did so, he allowed himself to cry. Through that moment of speaking he began to confront his fear and to build the relationships he wanted in his life.

Individuals confronting their fears together can build reconciled communities. I am grateful to my grandfather for sharing himself with me and for teaching me about the beautiful and hard parts of myself. By listening deeply to others we can find more than compassion for them, we can find the gifts within our own silences. And if we then choose to speak, we can change the world.

 

   

Photos from October

Join our second Personal Sustainability Weekend!

Where: "Off-grid" Eco-friendly Forest Camp, Platbos Forest (click here & visit their site for photos)

Dates: 17-18 November 2012 

Time: Departing CT around 2pm on Friday and arriving back at 4pm on Sunday 

"Our vision for the weekend is to create the opportunity for people, particularly those 

working in the non profit sector, to continue to strengthen their personal sustainability 

through exchange with one another, building relationships, room for personal reflection, 

wilderness reconnection and rest."
 

Please RSVP to: 

nicci.leroux@gmail.com 

no later than Friday 9 Nov 2012

Here are some photos from our last sustainability weekend: