Motivation:

Greetings, my name is Nonceba Tau. I am an Applied drama and theatre by practitioner. My profession is infusing creative arts and education for social transformation. I completed my BA Honors degree (Applied Drama: Theatre in Education, Communities and Social context). I my use my passion and the skills I acquired to practise in my field. Currently I am volunteering in an NPO based in my small developing township, Swaneville in the Westrand region. The organization, Young Minds Art Projects specialises in providing performing arts training to children and the youth, creating employment opportunities to aspiring performing arts, assist with sharing data for development opportunities to our community, engage in community development programmes, collaborating with potential stakeholders to have a community that is socially and economically transformed. My work in the organization is delegating work to the support team, fixing administration needs such as compiling reports, seeking source of funds, generally managing the organization, provide theatre skills training, creating projects, collaborate/partner with stakeholders and create access of development opportunities to our community. Our community is not much exposed to the performing arts, and it has a lot of aspiring artists who wish to practise their expertise. Most people do not know where to begin and where to get information, there is little employment opportunity because of lack of information, lack of funds to continue to study, and different social issues that causes the youth and children to be less exposed to their career goals and more immersed in issues that discourage them. Collaborating with stakeholders in some of the events/programmes/workshops we analysed that education system needs to be upgraded in our community. There should be technological, literacy and business programmes/ projects that need to be implemented. Our organization has 3 projects to reach a notion of intervening to such matters. Currently the project that is in a progressive growth is a funded project, Kwasuka-sukela. The project is educational, using process drama to preserve the use of vernacular language, catered for children in early childhood phase and the use of forum theatre to create awareness about bullying as gangsterism has stirred our community. It is funded by Social Employment Fund through the mediation of Assitej SA, our partners and stakeholders as the organization and ours are focused on creating theatre in Education for children and the Youth. We get funding in a manner of stipends, dedicating 64 hours, 8 days to the project monthly. We are currently using our cellphones to do our work as a team, we have 1 laptop currently which we bought after winning a performance competition. We are an executive team of 5 and we share a laptop. This creates a time-consuming working method despite us being able to complete our tasks. Cellphones are not reliable for work as they are personal use devices. We ask that we get a donation of 5 tablets that will assist each person to work productively or a laptop. We work in the library for our administration work and rehearsals/programmes are held in a community hall that needs to be renovated, we are thriving in these spaces and we are not hoping to not continue creating employment opportunities and creating doing theatre in for social transformation because of limited resources, may we kindly be assisted in this matter. We are dedicated to using it efficiently, be responsible within its use. It will make a huge difference to the project to reach its full potential of great administration work. We are happy to communicate back about any information required, references, NPO registration details etc. We give gratitude to anyone out there thinking and hoping to donate and are grateful to WantedTech for an opportunity to not only providing a platform of asking for help, but for any reader out there to know of various stories of people who hope to accomplish better. Thank you.