5 minute read
Grad Gallery: Jade Orgill
LinkedIn: bit.ly/3tApy9n
Current position:
Advertisement
Founding Executive Director at The Sprightly Seed NPC
Managing Director at Consulting Possibility
Academic history:
2019 Permaculture Design at Permaculture South Africa
2013 Master of Social Science, specialising in Social Planning and Administration at UCT
2011 Bachelor of Social Science honours, specialising in Social Development at UCT
2007 Diploma in Project Management at Varsity College
2004 Bachelor of Business Administration at University of South Africa
________
What is The Sprightly Seed and what led you to creating it?
I naturally gravitated toward the rights and needs of children over the 12 years I’ve spent in development practice. Along the way, I nurtured a passion for sustainable living, growing more and more connected to what was happening to the earth and how I could shift it through the power I have as an individual.
In 2015, I took a moment to reflect on where I had been, what I had learned and re-imagined what I was truly capable of. So I took everything I had, knowledge, experience and strength and wrote a development programme that would help communities sustain their basic needs and right to healthy food over the long term. Food gardening had been a practice I had been nurturing in my own life and it was something I loved. I knew the critical importance of it, not only to children, but to communities as a whole as well as the environment; I wanted to share it. The Sprightly Seed was started in 2017 and it now runs a food security programme for child projects located in resource poor communities of the Western Cape.
What are your responsibilities at The Sprightly Seed?
As managing director of The Sprightly Seed I am responsible for multiple functions within the business; from financial control mechanisms and policy development to the simplest of operational reports required in the field. We have been in business for 3.5 years and much of our starting years have been dedicated to building a quality product and service for our beneficiary base. This means that I spend a lot of time quality controlling the implementation of the work we do, ensuring that we are not only effective and efficient, but that each project receives the pivoting they need in order to be successful.
Even though our product is standardised, we often find that our service can only be uniform to a certain extent. When project needs differ we have to tweak our service to meet their needs. Behaviour change is individual and as development practitioners we have to adapt in order to achieve the outcomes we need.
What value do your qualifications add to your work, directly or indirectly?
I am fortunate to have a corporate business foundation. Even though I was unhappy in this sector it has afforded me a baseline of operational principles upon which I have built The Sprightly Seed. We are functional, efficient and outcome driven in the way that we operate internally as well as in our beneficiary environments. Having postgrad qualifications in the social sciences ensures that the decisions we make are primarily in service to the communities we work in, so that behaviour change and resource allocation for a better society is delivered in a sustainable way. Postgrad qualifications and our experience in the social sector allow us to think in a matrix fashion. We consider and take into account the myriad of influences that form the context of where we work. This informs our planning and execution over the short and long term.
What are the key skills that have contributed to your success so far?
A willingness to understand your environment and the capability to do so effectively is attributed to natural interest/motivation to make an impact, curiosity and research skill. Without these it becomes very difficult to make a difference and meaningful change in society. Further, the tenacity and resilience needed to build your own business from the ground up has, in hindsight, been my most valuable skill set. To be successful at anything, one has to understand that the road will be difficult at times. In order to arrive at the “wins” you need to be steadfast in your commitment to reach a goal and find your way around each challenge, never losing sight of your intention.
What impact has COVID-19 had on your work at The Sprightly Seed?
Our clients are predominantly Early Childhood Development Centres in vulnerable communities, and what we grow in our food gardens at these centers nutritionally boost the meals that enrolled children receive daily. The national lockdown of educational facilities has had a crippling impact on the basic needs of children who had already come from food insecure homes. Many of our food gardens are located within communities most deeply affected by the pandemic.
The principals at our centres, understanding their context and the dependency of their kids on the meals they provide, took it upon themselves to continue providing meals as far as they could, using the produce from the gardens we helped them establish. Still, this remained insufficient for families as job and financial resource losses left them heavily constrained. At the onset (April 2020) The Sprightly Seed launched an Emergency Relief Campaign for the families of the children enrolled at our centres. We needed to shift our focus and adapt our short term goals to meet the needs of the moment. Receiving incredible support from individual and corporate donors, we were able to reach out to the families of the kids enrolled at our centres, providing them with non-perishable food items as well as hygiene packs.
How do you see permaculture evolving in South Africa in the next few years?
A broad and simple definition of permaculture is the development of sustainable and self-sufficient ecosystems. In agricultural terms, current human practice is a great distance from being self-sufficient or sustainable, in fact we are not integrated into the earth’s ecosystem at all. I believe in our ability to correct our course through greater individual and collective engagement with the environment. Spending more time understanding and learning about the natural world will allow us to better understand our fault lines and the appropriate individual and collective policy shifts should organically take place from this baseline of understanding. As we know, behaviour change doesn’t come without awareness as a starting point and a willingness to see and engage with the potential benefit of change over the long term. I hope more of us start to connect with natural ecosystems in a way that we are able to see ourselves as a part of it.
