Two Books, One Power to Build a Different World
South Africa's Be a Nelson Movement: The Story That's Not in the News
“You learn about the structure, the organization within communities that will usually be seen as chaotic and just scenes of crime. It's actually the opposite.”
— Nico de Klerk
The upcoming book One Size Fits None: Time for an Entrepreneurial Revolution challenges us to make it normal, when facing entrenched problems and broken systems, to launch experiments to address them—no matter who we are or where we live. This is the second in a series of newsletters about people on the front lines of this work, people whose ideas power the book. To learn more about One Size Fits None and how you can get involved in its project, click here:
In the book we feature the work of Nico de Klerk and his colleagues in the “Be a Nelson” movement. De Klerk founded and serves as CEO of South Africa’s StreetBiz Foundation. In an interview, he delves into his work building a growth network that supports and inspires individuals to reach their highest potential. In South Africa, de Klerk ventured into the Thabo Mbeki informal settlement, an area often stereotyped as chaotic and dangerous. Instead, he discovered a tightly-knit community that welcomed strangers:
where you literally have a structure built with anything that you can think of … three by three meters or 10 feet by 10 feet or something like that, small…. Then you learn about the structure, the organization within communities that will usually be seen as chaotic and just scenes of crime. It's actually the opposite.
He advises getting into the mindset of a leader you admire and thinking about how they would handle situations. For him, Nelson Mandela’s principles of inclusivity and unity are guiding lights:
Whenever I get confronted with a situation I don't understand…. I will just go into the mindset of Nelson Mandela.... It's like hearing his voice.
Building on this, de Klerk describes the "Be a Nelson" movement as a catalyst for human resilience, enabling marginalized youth and unemployed people to overcome obstacles and achieve their goals.
It's human resilience at its best ... why will you only stay focused on the negative or the obstacles? The only reason to focus on that is how to remove it."
Click the image above for the full episode—and the book cover below for de Klerk’s book No Fit, about his 1700-mile journey on foot to deliver workshops on the entrepreneurial mindset to nearly 50,000 marginalized youth and unemployed in township communities across South Africa.
There couldn’t be a better title to read alongside One Size Fits None, which tells the stories about people like those in the Be a Nelson movement, who are creating solutions from the ground up. In the book, we present evidence that experimenting to solve pressing problems can become an everyday activity for far more than just a few of us. Our times, we argue, demand no less.
Click on the cover below to learn about our Kickstarter campaign to reach beyond academic audiences and enable more people to enable entrepreneurs and changemakers, the way de Klerk has done.
Backers of the campaign can choose to receive signed copies, participate in our book launch events, or bring workshops in the kind of work de Klerk does to your own community, school or organization.
