DDP Partner Celebrates 10 years of Community Development and Citizen Engagement

Youth Inter-Active known as YIA is, a youth-led community organization working around eThekwini Municipality to empower today’s youth to be future leaders” through dialogues, debate, training, art, and sport. “We purport to capacitate, encourage, motivate and lead youth equally”.

This year, 2021, this organization is celebrating 10 years of existence and of uplifting communities, and they have survived challenges over the past 10 years through meaningful partnership and building good relationships with stakeholders such as the DDP, Activate, and a few CSO in the eThekwini district.

In 2020, at the beginning of Lockdown, Youth Inter-Active saw a gap in service delivery for food parcels during level 5 and also educating the public on regulations to ease the anxiety and stress in the community, by doing so, the National Development Agency liked the idea and started linking the organization to their stakeholders for the support.

“We were invited to their volunteering program under SASSA to help to process the new grand “R350” and also give education on covid19 to the grant pay points.  Then DOH also appointed us through Civic Society Forum to be the front line organization in EThekwini amongst others to facilitate covid 19 tracings, testing, and screening. This was a skill that made us survive from Level 5 till Level 1 and we are hopeful that we will be given other projects as we never back down for any challenges”, says Nkosikhona Mpungose, Leader and Founder of YIA.

The organization is still involved in communities on covid19 monitoring, education, and sensitization of vaccines.

Personally, as Nkosikhona Mpungose I have grown to be the best leader in the spaces I serve through the training and networks DDP has introduced me to.  For YIA it the same, we are well respected on the grounds we serve because of the way we conduct ourselves through applying what we have been thought at DDP through different training.

He added that as an organization, they are now a part of the active citizenry forum with Youth Council, Youth Sector as well as Activate on giving the information on the ground as civic educators; and we are also actively involved on DDPs Local Government election dialogues that are now taking place, and through that, we believe as an organization we have grown a lot in the space of understanding governance and processes as this won’t be the first time being involved.

“Our next move is to get funding that will allow the organization to operate on it full capacity as per our vision and mission in our constitution”, he said.