“When I was five years old, cinemas in South Africa had just opened to people of all races after years of apartheid-era restrictions on the movement of people of colour. On that historical occasion, I ended up at the movies with Marta’s daughter (my grandparent’s domestic worker at the time). We watched Roland Joffe’s film ‘The Mission’ (1986). I still remember feeling distraught, at how these foreign settlers were going in and destroying the lives of the native people. At the time I did not realise the significance of that moment– a white Afrikaans girl at the movies with a coloured girl – but looking back, I believe the experience and that film profoundly influenced my path”, recalls Carla.
Being a developmental organisation is not an easy task. It covers a complex range of fields including personal development, psychology, diverse therapies, cross-cultural communication and systems thinking, and many more. Unlike traditional charity models that often focus on providing hand-outs – though there are times when this is necessary – we are committed to fostering change through deliberate, grassroots processes that are often slow and painstaking. Julius Neyere’s 1973 quote encapsulates our approach:
“Development brings freedom, provided it is development of people. But people cannot be developed; they can only develop themselves. For a while; it is possible for an outsider to build a person’s house, but an outsider cannot give the person pride and self-confidence in themselves as human beings. Those things people have to create for themselves by their own actions.”
Carla expresses a deep sense of gratitude to her parents for giving her the gift of travelling; after completing school they did not pressure her to study immediately. This freedom gave her the opportunity to spend time and learn about different cultures abroad in parts of Asia, Europe and Africa that lived closer to nature. Once she returned to South Africa, she completed a master’s degree in Anthropology. Carla longed for work that would allow her to be in service, appreciate cultural diversity and environmental sustainability in ways that empower communities and help protect our planet. “My master’s covered topics about xenophobia, which made me realise that the more we try to understand each other as different cultures, the more tolerant we can become to live and work alongside each other in peace.” One of our intentions behind Cultural Connections is more than the programmes we run or the people we choose to work with, we strive to create pathways for real cultural connections, building stronger relationships and trust between racially and culturally diverse people. We don’t always get this right, and is not easy, but we keep it as our intention.
As mentioned, Carla’s journey to co-founding Cultural Connections began years ago at Calabash Trust, a NGO in Gqeberha, where she discovered grassroots community work and at the same time started exploring indigenous knowledge systems. In 2009, Carla started working at Calabash Trust as a project manager for their various projects. While it was not an environmental organisation, it was her introduction to social development, the world of philanthropy and formed the training ground for testing ideas. Over the years, Carla and the team began including asset/strengths based approaches and permaculture principles and training into the community development programmes and international exchanges with the support of partners such as Wickersley School and Sports College and Reed’s School from the United Kingdom. “Reflecting on those early years, there are many things we would have chosen to do differently, and I feel grateful for the experiential learning opportunities we had that we can now use at Cultural Connections”, says Carla.
Carla met Bernie Dollie after the soap project failed. Through Ninnette Eliasov from Elamanzi, Bernie introduced Carla to the concept of Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD), a bottom-up approach she was pioneering at Ikhala Trust, which encourages communities to identify their own strengths and resources. She then became part of the ABCD community of practice who ran workshops and implemented this work around Southern Africa. Ikhala Trust also paid for Carla to complete a course, ‘Building on Local Indigenous Knowledge for Community Development’ at the Coady Institute, Canada. “This course added value to our approach, and affirmed that we were doing something right, even though it did not always feel that way, due to the slow nature of the work. At the heart of what we are trying to do, is shifting paradigms from so much conditioning – from needs based to strengths based, scarcity to abundance, focussing on what we have instead of what we don’t have, supporting each other rather than acting jealous, etc. It starts with ourselves, before we even think of working with others in this field, and I am so grateful for these reminders that I received from Bernie and Nin, who I credit for how we work at Cultural Connections” said Carla.
Though Carla never originally set out to start an organisation, the idea of Cultural Connections evolved from her work and the friendships she formed with various colleagues while she was working with Calabash Trust. The organisation’s journey also reflects Carla’s life experiences – from her childhood memory of watching The Mission, a movie about colonialism, with her family’s domestic worker’s child, to her travels and experiences working in culturally rich and complex black South African communities. A key catalyst was Tim Ellis from Face Africa, now a board member of Cultural Connections, who invited us to collaborate on UK exchange trips in 2019, following the dissolution of Calabash Trust. The team that was part of hosting two groups from Wickerlsey School and Sports College that year inspired the formation and expansion of Cultural Connections to Tsitsikamma. In 2020, Cultural Connections was officially registered, shortly before the pandemic, which paved the way for various new programmes to take shape.
We have to embrace the messiness of culture. The vision for Cultural Connections isn’t one of rapid progress but one of sustainable, organic growth. “South Africa isn’t fully ready for decentralised work,” notes Carla, “but we’re trying to model something different, something that respects the complexities, and the unique needs of every programme, as well as good work ethic and principles.” Working in smaller towns, where social structures and racial dynamics can still be steeped in colonial history, requires patience, grace, and boundaries. “There’s no typical day here,” Carla says. “We see real transformations and small shifts alike, some visible and others quietly changing things from within.” The organisation strives to be a bridge, connecting people across divides and generations and bringing them into a shared space where we can learn, create, grow and maybe even heal. This is also what Cultural Connections logo represents – the Sankofa symbol from the Akan people of Ghana, West Africa. It reminds us that we can reach back and gather the best of what our past has to teach us so that we can achieve our full potential as we move forward. Whatever we have lost, forgotten, foregone, or been stripped of can be reclaimed, revived, preserved and perpetuated.