South Africa - St.Georges Orphanage - Previous Volunteering

'I lead and brought together the team to ensure that the children could expect and achieve more in their lives.'

The Situation:

As part of the MBA programme I lead a team of 5 people (1 South Africa, 1 Nigerian, 2 from India and myself) on a project to enable a children’s’ charity in Cape Town to deliver their work more effectively. 

The initial engagement was with the Manager of ‘St.Georges Orphanage for Girls’, which was one of 4 Children’s Home operating under the Diocese of Cape Town.  Following the initial scoping of the consulting engagement we expanded the coverage of the assignment to include the other 3 Children’s homes based in Cape Town which were: Leliebloem House, St Michaels Children’s Home for Girls, and St Francis Children’s Home. 

The children in the homes came from the Khayelitsha and Guguletu Townships of Cape Town, and the children of the Wine Estates surrounding Cape Town.  Some of the children were orphans after their parents or extended family had died, others were the children of young women who could not cope with all of their children and some had special needs suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome after their mothers that were vineyard workers had drank a large quantity of wine throughout their pregnancies.

Task:

• We needed to engage with all stakeholders to gain an understanding of needs and capabilities of the Childrens' Orphanages.

Result:

We concluded that each Children’s Home was operating independently of each other and trying to provide all services both front line and support functions.  This meant that in some homes workers and volunteers were providing services for which they were not specially trained for which was not in the interest of the children.  Time was also been wasted with administration performed in each home which if performed centrally could be delivered more efficiently.

We recommended that the 4 homes should create a join management board that would monitor the resource of front line services required in each home and collectively ensure this was delivered by separate single teams eg: 1 outreach programme, and a shared service centre which would perform admin, finance and human resource tasks.  We also identified the opportunity to reduce costs by creating a more efficient procurement structure by partnering with a major car manufacturer who as part of their Corporate Social Responsibility programme would procure all indirect materials for the children’s homes and in doing so utilize their economies of scale getting lower purchasing prices.

Conclusion:

The impact of these strategic changes were that the 4 Children’s Homes were able to improve their own efficiency by optimizing their own economies of scale, they were also able to move resource that had previously been focused on procurement into front line services thereby giving the Children more.  The addition of a partnership with the car manufacturer reduced costs and also created the opportunity for new volunteers and similar initiatives with other partners in future.

My role was to work with all the stakeholders to define the initial scope of the engagement, plan the on site meetings and allocate resources within my team, undertake some of the meetings with stakeholders, manage the relationships within the consulting team and at the client effectively, design the final report and presentation and ensure they were completed by allocating specific sections,  performing quality assurance review and ensuring the report read as one document, and ensuring that the presentation was prepared and delivered effectively.  We achieved all of the above to the satisfaction of the client and the business school faculty.

This was a fantastic engagement as I was able to spend time with the children and really understand their needs and I gained a huge amount of satisfaction from making a very positive difference to the workers, volunteers, and children.  I also worked with the charity after the MBA to advise them on how to implement the strategy that had been developed.

Following the engagement I continued to interact with the charity trustees to provide guidance as they began the implementation of the majority of our recommendations.