CGF Consortium meets in Johannesburg

For the Consortium’s fourth meeting, the team met at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa, hosted by the UJ Centre for Entrepreneurship and our colleagues there, Adelaide Sheik, Joyce Sibeko and Chris Schachteback.

We covered a lot of project business as well being part of a day looking at the social innovation landscape in South Africa, which will be replicated to examine the European context at the University of Alicante next year.

Day 1:

After an update on project activity since we last met in May from Julie, and a report on the Brussels networking event from Bibi, Johan took us through the final year of the project and the key deliverables from each partner and work package.

The bulk of our time together on day 1, though, was spent looking at the nearly-completed platform, discussing the digital lab roll-out on four of our South African campuses and, crucially, the beginnings of a group discussion on how we can ensure that our project lives on beyond the EU funding in October 2019.  We touched on funding options, global roll-out and how to ensure that both the platform and the digital storytelling modules add value to different constituencies.

Day 2:

As part of the Consortium meeting, UJ had put together an event which brought together a wider group of social innovators, from students to leaders of South African foundations, from government officials to academics. The aim was to explore how to create networks to produce a more formal ecosystem in social innovation and entrepreneurship in South Africa.  Some great partnerships were formed and there was a good deal of interest in Common Good First and its role in bringing people together both digitally and in real life.

Day 3:

For our final day we moved to UJ’s Soweto campus. Student elections were being held across the University so there was a real buzz on campus with last-minute campaigning.

Most of our last day together was spent on project admin –updates on AEC feedback from our last consultation with them, looking ahead to our next meeting in Alicante and a useful discussion on content and invitees for our final dissemination event in Cape Town in October 2019.  The most fun bit of admin, of course, will be our final report to the EU and we have begun to scope out deliverables and deadlines for that.

As ever, our meeting was captured by Will from Bundu Media.