SmilingOne Foundation

Laptops for Change Agents in South Africa

The SmilingOne foundation is a non-profit organization in South-Africa that sheds importance on strengthening people and societies with attention to limiting crime. They thereby want to reinforce people’s personal development specifically and society in South Africa more generally. The Smiling One Foundation focuses on disadvantaged peoples and societies in schools, prisons, and townships. They therefore implement so-called Circles of Change, that embrace a program in personal leadership development, a training on navigating life in gratitude and service, and an entrepreneurial skills program. This cycle of topics and exercises is centered around the individual within their communities. The efforts of the SmilingOne Foundation can allow clients to become pillars of support themselves. That is how sometimes people who received assistance during prison projects become Change Agents themselves. Being stationed in school projects after reintegration, they help to support youth at risk, while they can in their turn assist and inspire others.

 

At Close The Gap we are grateful to have supplied the SmilingOne Foundation with 3 laptops to help their team of Change Agents with the organization’s administration. It will be used to keep track of the data that often covers many sessions, projects, and interactions the foundation uses to obtain its goal. We are most grateful for the testimony our contact at the foundation gave us, highlighting how this management of data allows them to ‘deeply connect to the journey of our clients (students and inmates) and support them’. It inspires us once again to look at the scope computer assets can have, as it is most thankful to be of help to the meaningful and important work the foundation delivers.