The Social Justice Initiative (SJI) is an NPO founded in 2013. It focuses on maximising the impact of available resources to create a more equitable society and to mobilise resources for critical aspects of social justice work in South Africa. It works with civil society initiatives under three broad themes: access to justice, governance and accountability; transparency including independent media; and state capacitation. The SJI adopts a social change funds model for resource mobilisation, where the organisation fundraises for, manages, monitors and reports on the impact of these funds from a social and systems change perspective.
In 2016, the SJI and a group of businesswomen raised more than R300 000 for work related to gender-based violence (GBV). Four centres providing care for Johannesburg-based GBV survivors were supported. In 2020, it partnered with the South African National Editors’ Forum during the Covid-19 pandemic to roll out emergency funding for journalists who had lost their livelihood and had not received retrenchment packages as well as freelancers who were retrenched or had their contracts cancelled from the date of implementation of the national lockdown on 26 March 2020. More than 430 journalists benefited from the fund, with corporate donors including FirstRand, MTN, Nedbank, Allan Gray, Old Mutual, Standard Bank, philanthropic foundation Open Society Foundation for South Africa and Yellowwoods Social Investments.
Currently, the organisation is more focused on systemic change. In 2023, it launched the New Futures Fund (NFF), which promotes and supports interventions that centre the role of citizens as key actors in deepening and sustaining South Africa’s democracy in the long term. The fund aims to bring about systems change by supporting work that increases citizen participation in formal democratic processes and advocating for increased state capacitation to address key service delivery challenges communities face. The goals of the fund include improving citizen engagement and public participation, supporting electoral reform initiatives, and advocating for capacitating the state by ensuring legislative oversight, greater executive accountability and service delivery as well as administrators and public officials being capable and responsive to their constituents. Implementing partners include the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation, My Vote Counts, the Democracy Development Program, PlanAct, the Public Affairs Research Institute, Pathways Institute, South African Institute of International Affairs in partnership with the Rivonia Circle, and Media Monitoring Africa.
The SJI also hosts an annual learning session that fosters collaboration and peer learning among implementing partners. “Our partners gather to share aspects of their work, along with successes and challenges,” says Portfolio Manager Noxolo Ntaka. “It is here where partners have begun to find synergies in the work with the intent to collaborate outside of formal SJI engagements as well.”
In raising funds for a common goal and collaborating with partners to achieve its objectives, the SJI hopes to unlock new funding sources for important social justice work across the country. The SJI aims to create a platform that unearths less visible interventions and showcases social justice organisations, contributing positively towards a thriving and sustainable social justice sector.
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Source: The original version of this article was published in the Trialogue Business in Society Handbook 2024 (27th edition).