Our Stories

We are proud to announce that Good Work Foundation (GWF) has won three awards at the 2018 Reimagine Education Awards, known as the “Oscars of education.” This year’s event, held in San Francisco, featured 1184 projects from 39 countries. With 160 international judges evaluating the projects, we are honoured to have represented South African and the African continent so well.

GWF won bronze in the sustainability category, silver in the regional category (Africa) and gold in the engineering and technology category. What stood out most this year was the sense of urgency. With issues like climate change, migration, nationalism and wealth disparity becoming more evident to many more people, attendees at the conference repeatedly asked:

“How can education be reimagined so that a shared future based on collaboration can become an achievable target?” The technology is not the centre of the conversation. Leveraging technology so that we can move towards a more inclusive future, is.

Examples of this at Reimagine 2018 included regional projects like Australia’s CareerTrackers Indigenous Internship Program to blue-sky thinking projects like Mindvalley University, a global initiative describe as an “un-university university” that uses online and live curricula that bring conscious lifelong learning into everyday homes.

GWF’s major showcase was our ecosystem of learning and working that has been developed on the Hazyview Digital Learning Campus.

The model has become well-known thanks to a start-up IT service-desk and call centre on campus that not only employs previously unemployed rural adults into the digital marketplace but also delivers double-digit cost savings to its customers, including the South African subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom.

What’s most exciting about our campus start-up is that the profits generated are being used to reimagine education. The profits fund access to inquiry-based learning, using education technology, for 4,300 schoolchildren from the surrounding villages. They are learning in new ways, posting huge improvements in basic literacy and numeracy.

This is our third consecutive year attending the conference and we are proud to stand side-by-side with organisations and their leaders who are urgently addressing humanity’s approaches to learning.

How do we create more access to learning? Then, how do we thoughtfully reimagine what our children need to learn in order to create a sustainable (and kind) future?

The GWF Reimagine 2018 team was represented by Kate Groch (GWF CEO), Linky Nkuna (Hazyview Digital Learning Campus Head of Campus), Verena Wagner (GWF Development Coordinator), Ryan James (GWF Head of Development) and Merle Blackman (GWF USA Foundation ambassador).

We would like to take the opportunity to congratulate the Reimagine 2018 overall prize winner, PeerWise, as well as the attendees and award-entrants from around the world, including fellow South Africans, Snapplify, Thando Education, and Bukela Ufende.

Written by Ryan James, GWF Head of Development