What a delight to welcome Nandipha Tshabane to the FunDza team. Nandi, as she likes to be called, is our new Beneficiary Liaison.
Nandi is passionate about youth development. For the last 16 years she’s been involved with clinical research, social protection and youth development. This seems like just the right role for her as she’s particularly excited about the relationship building aspect of her work as FunDza’s Beneficiary Liaison. She describes a liaison as a middle person and says that puts you in sticky situation but that she likes being there!
“One of my biggest qualities is that I have respect for people. If we approach people showing them respect instead of an attitude that we know it all, we will be able to walk the walk with them.”
She loves working with people and has worked with a whole lot of communities. She’s looking forward to meeting some of the beneficiaries and finding out what their challenges are so that we can serve them better.
Nandi can’t wait to get out there to meet with the people we’ve been supporting. In the first day or two after she arrived, a set of books was returned undelivered from a beneficiary group in Khayelitsha. Nandi now plans to do a personal delivery to the contact so that she can meet him and work out how we can support him and his organisation more in the future. We love this – it’s so in line with our FunDza ethos. And, we love the passion that she is bringing to her role as being the link to our beneficiary groups and readers across the country.
Nandi says that in the week she’s been with us, she’s not sleeping much. She is reading FunDza books! Hard copy and online. She is wanting to get herself into the space of reading in order to understand the beneficiaries and also to make reading a habit as well. For herself. By her own admission:
“I’ve not been much of a reader. But I am slowly, slowly becoming one.”
Welcome to FunDza, Nandi!