On a random Saturday in September, a couple of individuals came together for a workshop with the topic How to help without hurting.
This workshop was attended by over 30 volunteers and pastors from the various churches in the Linden fraternal, who are working together with Tshepo to help the most vulnerable members of our community.
The aim was to understand how to work in our community: how to help without hurting. What is enabling and what is supportive? What supports dependency and what enables empowerment? In order for us, the community, to not just offer charity, but offer empowerment, guidance and encouragement that is productive and valuable.
One of our volunteers, an occupational therapist presented most of the content and challenged the way we look at empowering people.
The highlight was definitely to see the participants engaged, to listen and learn from each other. To together, discover, how to better serve our community in a useful way.
“Helping people to escape the cycle of poverty is so complex and changing so fast that we need more platforms like this to bring faith communities and community organisations together with the goal to learn.” – unknown participant
