(Illustration by Luca Di Bartolomeo)
For three years, Réjane Woodroffe lived a life of extreme opposites. On a weekly basis, she undertook the 12-hour commute between Cape Town and an isolated community on South Africa’s southeast “Wild Coast.” The worlds could not have been further apart. In Cape Town, there was a modern apartment, a car, and a job in high-end finance. In her mud-brick home in the village, there was no running water, electricity, or roads. Her neighbors and later her colleagues were largely illiterate.
Réjane’s unlikely journey begins from her childhood. She grew up in what was classified a “colored township” in Cape Town during the height of the anti-apartheid struggle. By the time she’d reached university and South Africa had attained democracy, there was a sense among many activists that the struggle was over. Ten years later, it became clear that there was still much to do to achieve the country that had been fought for.
But how can individuals and organizations lead their communities to create long-lasting, permanent change? Réjane Woodroffe’s leadership experience in the remote Eastern Cape of South Africa gives funders and entrepreneurs a lesson in what it means to drive change alongside your community.
In 2004, Réjane and her husband Dave founded the small Bulungula Lodge, a small eco-friendly tourism retreat on the Xhosa Wild Coast, now completely owned and operated by the Nqileni village where it is located. Operating the Bulungula Lodge forced Réjane to come to terms with the scope of the contrast in lifestyles. “My everyday life in the village is the same as my neighbor’s, but I’m not poor. She is. Poverty is not about the absence of material possessions. It’s about not having resources, not understanding the immune system, not knowing your rights. Poverty is about people not knowing or owning their choices.”
In particular, it was seeing families lose children to preventable diseases which spurred the founding of the Bulungula Incubator (BI) in 2007—not as an intervention by Réjane into the community, but to act as a catalyst for the community itself to enact and own solutions to a range of issues. BI works in the most remote and under-resourced regions of South Africa’s Eastern Cape region. When the BI began, the village had no road, no health care, no schools, no electricity, no sanitation, no drinking water, and a near-total rate of illiteracy. Community members eked out an income from subsistence farming and remittances from migrant labor on the platinum mines around Johannesburg. Parasites and HIV were common, and nutrition was poor. A majority of households had lost a child to diarrhea and one in nine households had lost three or more children to this illness of bad water and poor sanitation.
The way BI works is that communities identify problems and possible solutions, and then BI works with them to achieve them, ensuring that communities feel (and literally have) ownership over their infrastructure. BI has led to a pre-K through college education network, cold-chain distribution for anti-virals, clinics, a hospital, renewable micro-grids, roads, entrepreneurship, and so on—all the first in their communities. The success, by design, is the community’s.
How did that change happen? Aprile Age, executive director of the McNulty Foundation, has followed the Bulungula Incubator’s work for over a decade. She and Johnny McNulty, the foundation’s director of content, sat down with Réjane to ask her about what she has experienced, learned, and how other leaders can achieve a similar level of community buy-in, participation, egalitarianism, and patience.
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McNulty: You describe Bulungula as a “community-led” venture. What does that mean in practice?
Réjane Woodroffe: Being humble. Assuming that you are the person in the room that might know the least about what’s going on, about what’s going wrong, about how to solve the issue. It’s bringing in as many voices as possible. If you work with the principle of humility, of consensus building, and of truly maximizing the agency of others, that’s how you build sustainable interventions that have the support of the community over time.
McNulty: What if no one in the community has the skills or experience to tackle a particular challenge?
Réjane Woodroffe: As much as possible, if we don’t have the skills locally, we train people locally, even if we need to outsource those tasks temporarily while you’re developing skills in-house. That way, the community will have more skills every year, and eventually all the ones they need. It takes longer, much longer, to grow your own timber but that’s how you develop resilience, self-reliance and sustainability.
We build agency by building skills and capacity within the community. The area that we’re in—because the access to education was so poor and no local job opportunities existed—there were few managerial, financial, administrative, or project management skills present. The easiest thing to do would have been to bring in a ton of people, perhaps even volunteers from outside, to do the job. We didn’t do that. Our administrative manager, our finance manager, our health program manager, our youth development program manager, they are all from the local community. Nearly 90 percent of our 150 staff come from the local community.
McNulty: How do you balance bringing in outside resources and maximizing the agency of others? It seems like that might be a balancing act, at times. How do you know when to step up and when to step back?
Réjane Woodroffe: We’re very conscious of being a catalyst for vibrant, sustainable rural communities—and of not being a provider. That is, we provide the skills and the training and we build the initial resources that the community needs to develop independence and self-determination.
For example, when we first came to Nqileni there was no functioning schooling at all. The local government school was a completely collapsed mud structure. We found that in October 2006, teachers had come for just five days of that month. We couldn’t understand why the community wasn’t outraged about the situation. But we realized that it was because they had never experienced excellent or functioning schooling themselves. Furthermore, the highest-paid community members were migrant laborers, who themselves did not have a primary school education.
McNulty: How did you demonstrate the value of functional schooling to people who’ve never experienced it before?
Réjane Woodroffe: We like to spark, and then what happens next is not entirely up to us. We don’t try to control that. That is very much for communities to do with as they will.
Instead of preaching to the community about what they should be doing or how they should be pushing the government to provide them with decent schooling, we decided to build a preschool of excellence in 2009. To emphasize the importance of education, we had an outside psychometrist evaluate and identify exceptional learners from our first preschool class, who were then selected to be part of our Vulindlela (“open the road”) Scholarship program and attend excellent schools in the city. This first preschool operated very successfully for three years.
At the end of that period, community members from other villages came to us and said, “We want preschools in our area.” The quote was, “You’ve turned the light on in my child’s mind.” We helped launch five preschools at the request of the communities in nearby villages, not because we told them to do it—they were the ones pushing for it. While we helped raise the funds to build the infrastructure, which can take quite a long time, the communities themselves built the huts that were needed for a preschool with mud bricks and grass roofs.
McNulty: I know you also helped launch a radio station in the community. Did you use the same approach there?
Réjane Woodroffe: Exactly. We had an idea to start a radio station. We spent $200 on a transmitter, got a license, turned it on, and gave the mic to one of our program managers from the local community and he just started talking. That was how the Bulungula Community Radio was born—and it’s been incredible how the local DJs have developed the radio station over time.
It doesn’t just entertain; it actively informs. It brings news focused on the local community. We have slots for talking about health, talking about education, talking about youth issues. It has a very popular, active WhatsApp group chat, and broadcasts to 80 villages now in the region, a catchment area of over 200,000 people, so it has an incredible impact. If you phone the radio station, you’ll get through! It’s not one of these big national radio stations. People know the DJs. Since training the DJs, we now have a station manager who comes from the local community. So it’s been an incredibly positive youth development project. The young people who run it have full agency to make it their own, and we just trust the process.
McNulty: How do you cultivate a culture of community empowerment and trust within your organization—not just at the leadership level, but at all levels?
Réjane Woodroffe: Two major ways: We’ve made equality a core value of our organization, and we live in the community ourselves.
We are very conscious of equality in how we lead the Bulungula Incubator. The ratio of the highest-paid managers in the organization to the lowest-paid employees is a ratio of five to one, which is a very flat remuneration structure. We don’t have separate offices; we all sit together, in a circle, in our offices. Everybody has access to everybody else. If people need quiet, there are quiet spaces where they can work, but for the most part, we work together. We find that very important in terms of ensuring everybody’s opinion is valued equally, everybody’s contribution is valued equally. When managers and employees value equality in the way that they operate in the organization, that filters through to valuing equality with our community members.
We are part of the tight-knit community. We live in the community. It’s very important for us to be proximate with our communities; we understand very deeply what the challenges are and our interventions affect us as well. The BI’s beneficiaries are also our neighbors, our friends, our colleagues. If a project doesn’t work, we understand quite intimately why. Very often, you can’t see why something works or doesn’t unless you see it over time. If you have a water project, and you are not drinking that water every day with your community members, you don’t understand the struggles and the pain of when it doesn’t work or has an unintended negative consequence.
McNulty: You take year-long sabbaticals regularly in order to create resiliency and foster leadership throughout the organization. Can you walk us through your thinking and share the impact of that approach? Why do you believe this is an important leadership practice?
Réjane Woodroffe: Dave, my husband and co-founder of the Bulungula Incubator, and I take one-year sabbaticals every fifth year. We’ve done it three times and it always feels like it’s not the right time or that the organization will not be able to recover, but it’s an essential thing to do. There’s never a right time to do it. The way to look at it is: anything could happen to you at any time. Then what happens to the organization? How does it survive? And leaving completely like that for a yearlong sabbatical ensures that the organization and staff develop the systems to be independent of you. You’ll only do that if you’re going to be away—and not for one, two, three months. Being away for 12 months means that the organization has to be able to stand without you. This of course begs the question of how we have the resources to take yearlong sabbaticals. The first is financial: we live very simply in a mud hut with a small solar system and live off rainwater. We drive a 15-year-old car that is rusted and falling apart and we made a decision to not have our own children. All this gives us an immense amount of personal and financial freedom. That said, we know that sabbaticals have been taken with children and can be made possible with considered financial planning.
The Bulungula Incubator now employs almost 150 people. It’s a substantial organization, but we continue taking that sabbatical. People step up in a real way, and there are things that go wrong, but you can always recover from that. It’s an essential way of developing an antifragile organization. It’s a stress test, and it ensures you don’t have founder syndrome. It means you the leader are actively working towards what your main job should be, hopefully you’re working yourself out of the job. We work ourselves out of our job every five years. You come back and there’s always some role for you to play. It’s a different role, but it also helps you to step back, see how the organization’s evolved and ask what the organization needs from you. That develops the agency in the community and builds the organization.
The roles that Dave and I have played when we’ve gotten back have always changed. It’s always evolved. It’s hard to see an organization while you’re in it. Once you step back, you can see it more clearly.
This piece includes excerpts from Pivotal Moments, a series of leadership case studies on McNulty Prize Laureates published by the McNulty Foundation.
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