Cape Town’s pop-up store for the homeless goes global

                                                               The South African - London UK

A groundbreaking idea turns the old adage beggars can’t be choosers on its head.

Looking out from their advertising agency balcony onto the main street, a pair of Cape Town advertising creatives has changed the way people give and receive for humanitarian reasons worldwide.

The copywriter and art director team of Kayli Levitan and Max Pazak say they were simply looking for a way to bring together the “haves and have-nots” who fill the streets around their workplace area every day. With support from their ad agency M&C Saatchi Abel, and partnering with the nearby headquarters of the Haven Night Shelter, Cape Town’s largest network of homeless shelters, the team have fine-tuned a concept aimed at changing the process of giving and receiving. The idea is simple, and yet uniquely ingenious, and it has gone viral, and has captured the imagination of people worldwide.

“We work in a very trendy part of Cape Town called Green Point. Restaurants, designer stores, hotels and more line the streets,” says Levitan. “But on the other hand there is a huge problem in the area. From our balcony we see the haves and the have-nots walk the streets every day. You are often told not to give to the homeless, as you are not sure what they are going to do with the donation. People are also sometimes ignorant as to where to take their donations, as they haven`t been exposed to this kind of life before. We saw a middle ground. A place where it would be easy to donate, and more importantly, a place to give with dignity to those who do not have.”

Exactly how does a Street Store work?

“The Street Store is made up of a series of five or more posters,” says Pazak. “They can quite literally pop-up in any community that the store is needed. People bring in their donations, which we help them to ‘hang up’ on our posters with a hanger design. And then “drop” shoes and accessories into our boxes. Shop assistants then help the homeless have a full shopping experience choosing from the clothing on display, for free.”

Thanks to a well-timed web presence and social media drive, an overwhelming number of donors came to donate for the pilot street store in Green Point. So successful were the first four activations in Cape Town that the agency was inundated with requests to duplicate The Street Store across the world.

To date the concept has grown to see street stores being duplicated in the city streets of Brussels, Vancouver, San Diego, Sao Polo and a number of other cities worldwide since then.

Were there challenges in activating the pop-up store?
The biggest challenge was the fear that people would not take up the call to donate. “We had sleepless nights leading up to the first pop up store, but were overwhelmed by people’s generosity,” says Pazak. Another challenge was that the vast majority of the homeless are men (unsurprisingly it is women who spring clean their cupboards more often) but thankfully no one went away empty handed.

So far more than 263 cities from around the world have signed up to host a Street Store — posters have been translated through social media into nine languages. As the Street Store concept rolls out globally, picking up momentum, kudos have been coming in from all corners, including at the 2014 Cannes Lions Festival. M&C Saatchi Abel was awarded a prestigious Gold Lion in the design category, a bronze in the media category, with six other shortlists, including the Grand Prix for Good Award in June.

The Executive Mayor of Cape Town, Patricia de Lille said: ‘This is a great example of how progress can be made possible together. It is wonderful to see private companies step up to the plate, using their ideas and resources to play a role in solving social problems in an innovative way. It is our vision in the City of Cape Town that all companies will follow in this example, because that is when our potential as a city will truly be limitless”.

On top of an endless stream of words of encouragement that are received daily, Levitan says that they receive an additional 30/40 questions and requests a day to download the branding material. It is hardly surprising that another award-winning design initiative originates out of the Mother City, the designated 2014 World Design Capital. The Street Store is a demonstration of how simple ideas, that touch people, will find their own way around the world and create remarkable change.

The Street Store in action:

Oscar-nominated SA film ‘Four Corners’ screens countrywide in the UK

                                                                    The South African London - UK
                                                      

The South African award winning thriller Four Corners has been invited to screen as part of a special UK film tour designed to bring attention to South Africa’s 20 Years of Democracy.

Supported by the BFI Programming Development Fund and the SA-UK Seasons, the ‘South Africa at 20′ film touring programme aims to feed into the various events that are taking place both in South Africa and the UK to mark the 20th anniversary of South Africa’s democracy.
A slate of UK Film Festivals will screen Four Corners and other related films at cinemas across the UK – from London to Edinburgh, Cambridge, Bristol, Glasgow and Wales, with the intention of building UK African cinema audiences and raising the profile of African cinema in the UK. The tour will launch at a VIP event in London in early October to be opened by former Labour government minister and philanthropist Baron Paul Boateng – and will continue to run from 2014 through to February 2015.
South African filmmaker Ian Gabriel, director of Four Corners, has been invited to take part in Q&A sessions and other events around the UK. The films will also be complemented by an extensive educational and outreach programme, which would include school and pop-up screenings.

Featuring in a section titled Post-Apartheid Challenges, Four Corners will screen alongside two other South African films, Life Above All and Miners Shot Down.

Four Corners has also been selected to screen in competition during the same period at The Santa Fe Film Festival USA and The Bahamas International Film Festival. It will compete in Best Foreign Film and Best Feature Film Categories at both these festivals.
The film has already garnered international success with two Best Film wins at various film fests and one Best International Film nomination at the Academy Awards. The producers plan to continue to promote South African made film both at home in South Africa, and abroad through initiatives like the British Council Film Africa tour.
“We are very excited to be part of the Democracy Tour,” says the director. “This news comes with the announcement that Four Corners has been picked up by independent film distributor Munro Films for general cinema distribution in the UK. The film opens a window on marginal South African communities and tells a positive coming of age story set in tough circumstances. The ‘forgotten community’ depicted in Four Corners is only one of the many marginal societies in South Africa whose voice is only faintly heard despite the 20 year old challenge to deliver inclusive democracy to all South Africans.
“We’re proud that Four Corners has been added to the voices calling for broadening of democracy among youth in South Africa,” says Gabriel.

Watch the Four Corners trailer:

“What I want to do is to tell a good story, that is all”: In conversation with Caine Prize winner Okwiri Oduor

                                                                      AfriPOP! Magazine

Kenya’s Okwiri Oduor has won the 2014 Caine Prize for African Writing, described as Africa’s leading literary award, for her short story entitled ‘’My Father’s Head’’. Oduor visited the Book Lounge in Cape Town last week to launch ‘The Gonjon Pin and other Stories’, an anthology of the 2014 Caine Prize. Daluxolo Moloantoa attended the event and had the importunity to speak with Odour about what it means to her to win the prize, the inspiration for “My Father’s Head”, her favourite authors and the best part about being a writer.

Joining Oduor on the shortlist for the Caine Prize were Billy Kahora (Kenya), Efemia Chela (Ghana, Zambia), Tendai Huchu (Zimbabwe) and the South African author Diane Awerbuck. All five were published in “The Gonjon Pin and other Stories“.Oduor directed the inaugural Writivism Literary Festival in Kampala, Uganda in August 2013. Her novella, The Dream Chasers was highly commended in the Commonwealth Book Prize, 2012. She is a 2014 MacDowell Colony fellow and is currently at work on her debut novel.

‘’My Father’s Head‘’ explores the narrator’s difficulty in dealing with the loss of her father and looks at the themes of memory, loss and loneliness. The narrator works in an old people’s home and comes into contact with a priest, giving her the courage to recall her buried memories of her father. “My Father’s Head” originally appeared in Short Story Day Africa‘s collection, Feast, Famine and Potluck, as did Chela’s shortlisted story “Chicken”.

Oduor, the third Kenyan to take the prize, after Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor in 2003 and Binyavanga Wainaina in 2002, receives £10 000 prize money, as well as the opportunity to take up a month’s residency at Georgetown University in the US, as a Writer-in-Residence at the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice.

Congratulations on winning the Caine Prize! How does it feel to join that illustrious list?

Thank you. It is such an honour to have been recognised in this manner, to be given this incredible gift.

Are you going to take up the residency at Georgetown University?

Yes. I look forward to the experience.

The Caine Prize is affectionately known as “the African Booker”. What aspects of your writing – if any – do you see as specifically African?

There is no checklist. I am not too keen to take part in the clamour for categorisation. What I want to do is to tell a good story, that is all.

How did the idea for “My Father’s Head” hit you?

I left home and felt deeply sad and lonely when I realised I was an adult. I was grieving my childhood.

How long did it take you to write the story? Did you feel unusually inspired, or was it more challenging than usual to complete?

I cannot remember how long it took. My average is usually a couple of weeks. Each story is unique and has its own peculiar set of challenges. In that way, I cannot compare it to anything.

What’s your favourite part of writing?

Getting lost in another world. Embodying my characters. Forgetting myself, feeling, seeing, tasting things as my characters do.

“My Father’s Head”  is a story about coping with loss, memories, and finding meaning with the ones we love. What inspired you to write the story?

I was estranged from my loved ones for a while. I thought of it as being in exile — from home, from them, from myself. During this time, I thought a lot about mortality, about the meaning of home and the spaces that one inhabits while there. What happens to home when you leave? Do these spaces lay fallow, waiting for your return? What if you never find your way home again? And what if you do, and you find that it has changed, and that your people are no longer yours? Are your people really, infinitely, your people?

Who are some of your literary influences?

That is a difficult question. Different people see different influences in my work. I would say my first influences were the housemaids of my childhood. Through the oral tradition—those stories they told on the veranda while they shelled peas, about djinnis swirling in cooking pots — they influenced a lot of my writing.

I grew up acutely aware of the existence of several, concomitant realities. It was not that I believed in them, nor that this was necessary, but that the people around me did, and so, invariably, I had to acknowledge that the world is a mysterious place that I will never fully comprehend.
I do not know if I would call it influence, but female Black writers like Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid and Edwidge Dantecat stirred something deep inside me.

You directed the Inaugural Writivism Festival in Kampala, Uganda, can you tell us a bit about that experience?

It was very small then and still floundering, with little by way of financial support but much by way of energy and enthusiasm. I am happy to see that it has improved tremendously since then. Bwesigye [bwa Mwesigire] and his team have done a good job this year, and I look forward to watching it grow even bigger.

You teach creative writing, what is your advice for aspiring writers?

Last year, I taught creative writing to young girls. I think there is plenty of technical advice given by writers far more experienced than myself. To that, I really can add nothing. I would, however, like to advice young writers – and artists — to embrace themselves. You are incredible, and your work is beautiful, and you must honor yourself and it. There is no shame in you or in what you do.
I know that it is easy to dismiss this as overly sentimental, but in my opinion, not enough words of this nature are being said to young people. They certainly were not being said to me. As a result, I was torn between forces within me and those without, each pulling hard in opposing directions. I wish to tell aspiring writers to brace themselves, that the road ahead is long and torturous, but that it is also unbelievably funny.

What else will you be doing while in South Africa?

I will attend the 2014 Mail & Guardian Literary Festival in Johannesburg, which is dedicated to the memory of the most important African woman writer of our times, the late Nadine Gordimer, and I’ll also be teaching a  short story writing workshop in Soweto.

Can you divulge anything about your upcoming debut novel?

There is not much I can say at this stage except that everyone must just sit and wait.

It’s Open Book time for lovers of South African fiction

                                                            The South African - London,UK

For everyone else December is the perfect time to be in Cape Town. For book enthusiasts, that perfect time is about five days each year in September.

Like its jazz counterpart, the Open Book Festival is the city’s grandest gathering of book aficionados from across the world. Boasting an eclectic mix of writers from across the writing world and programmes from panel discussions, comic strip markets and documentary film premiers, the festival clearly aims to go beyond the definition of a book festival by a long stretch.

The line-up of events in this year’s fest is packed with activities guaranteed to appeal to those who do not even make the time to turn a page. But for those who do just to hear the names such as Deon Meyer, Wilbur Smith, Zukiswa Wanner, Margie Orford, Mark Gevisser and Malaika wa Azania will be enough reason for them to book their tickets.

Included in the festival is a series of topical panel discussions on piercing issues in South Africa, from the state of the media, reclaiming Khoi San heritage, getting the born-frees reading, and a reflection on our twenty years democracy through literature are among the many discussions lined up.
Beyond the discussions there are other equally stimulating deviations such as the popular Open Book Comics Fest. The festival includes a marketplace, live drawing sessions and talks with established comics on various industry topics.


It would’t be a book festival without some poetry. Lovers of the poetic verse are well catered for with eleven signature events spread over the weekend. Featured are multi-lingual performances, pertinent discussions, and a range of emerging and established poets sharing the stage for readings and performances. The focus for this year`s poetry festival is the role of mother tongues in contemporary South African poetry. The role of the genre in the fight against apartheid is also looked at.

On top of all this is a film festival hosted in partnership with the legendary Labia Theatre. There will be some premiers for films such as Out Of Print, a film which draws viewers into the topsy-turvy world of words, illuminating the turbulent and exciting journey from the book through to the digital revolution. Another film to watch out for is Gore Vidal – The United States of Amnesia, which is an intimate portrayal of the American writer and his critique of modern American society.

Find further info on booking and schedules on the official website – www.openbookfestival.co.za

Photos by Open Book Festival