The Giving Economy: Building SMME’s Through Community

Enterprise Development comes out of corporate social investment (CSI) and it has become an industry centred on developing SMME’s through government legislation called the BBBE Act. The whole reason is to eradicate poverty, unemployment & inequality through transformation of industries in line with addressing past economic imbalances.

So THUD in partnership with BrownSense and Paybook has launched a crowdfunding platform for SMME’s called The People’s Fund. It’s based on ‘The Giving Economy‘, we are of the belief that we as the crowd can build the economy one business at a time. We have a seen a great success rate amongst the campaigns loaded currently as we’ve rased just over R65,000.00 in 5 weeks. That’s great validation for what we already know that South Africans are always willing to give a person the benefit of the doubt. As people give the minimum required, they get something in return, the interesting thing we’ve picked up is that, more often than not, we’re seeing people contribute more than the basic requirement, which shows you the spirit of South Africans.

We’ve reached out to ladies that we have great admiration for in our journey of entrepreneurship. Heidi Flint has worked both in the NPO space as a marketer and branding specialist. She worked very closely with entrepreneurs at Branson Centre of Entrepreneurship founded by Richard Branson and the Virgin Group. Moving back into the corporate world has been an awesome journey cause she brings a different twist to what corporate citizenship is all about. We are looking forward to getting key insights and learnings from Heidi’s experience in the field.

Yuniya Khan is a darling who’s a got a very sweet heart. Her whole world revolves around development. Her work across the US and Brazil and now South Africa cannot be quantified. We look forward to learning and getting key insights and comparisons between the 3 countries she’s had working experience in with regards to ‘The Giving Economy‘. Checkout The Emerge Project to see the power of storytelling at work. Yuniya’s work is simply amazing.

See you on Friday. Bring cash, it’s nice for the pitchers to win money towards their businesses when we crowd-fund 😉

RSVP HERE!