Elam Empowerment NPC
What does your company do?
Elam Empowerment is a nonprofit organisation founded in 2025, focused on empowering the disenfranchised with the ultimate goal being reintegration into society. The groups of disenfranchised that we work with are the homeless, unemployed youth, incarcerated women and survivors of gender-based violence.
One of the core tenets of the work we do is the age old saying, “give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for life”. And so, while we work on addressing the immediate issue/problem, we also look at ways to empower and equip them to “fish for themselves”, with the ultimate goal of reintegration.
What started with us assisting homeless individuals find spaces in homeless shelters during 2020 lockdown has grown and evolved into an organisation caring for the forgotten amongst our society. From financial literacy for homeless recyclers, to summits and incubation programmes equipping unemployed youth, to pad drives and campaigns for the prioritisation of women’s menstrual health within the South African carceral system, to dialogues and engagements to address and resolve the femicide and GBV epidemic.
Through advocacy, education and strategic partnerships, Elam Empowerment has, and continues to create real change, as we believe that no one is too far gone to be given another chance. As is our motto, people are our priority.
What is your biggest success?
The number of lives we’ve impacted and changed in the past five years has been an honour. Engaging with what started as strangers, to becoming beneficiaries that we walked a journey with, and then engaging our community and experiencing them rally around the different causes we are passionate about has been beautiful. To see what started as a small pad drive in Dec 2023 where approximately 90 packs of sanitary pads (approx 800 individual sanitary pads) were delivered to Kgosi Mampuru Prison in Pretoria, after the staff had expressed having a pad shortage for the inmates, to 960 packs of sanitary pads delivered in 2024 (approx 10 000 individual pads), to what was our most recent delivery of over 4500 packs of sanitary pads (approx 40 000 individual pads)
What has been your biggest hurdle?
Having to learn that we cannot want change for the individuals we engage with more than they want it for themselves has been a hard lesson to learn time and time again. Our first group in the Rise to Reintegr8 financial literacy programme ended up stepping back from the programme because they felt limited and wanted to spend their money as recklessly as they had been previously. While we were heartbroken, as we saw the potential for them to change their lives, we had to allow them the agency to make their own decision as it is their lives, after all. To see the same men who had been excited about the prospect of being able to make payments using their bank cards, tapping to make payments like everyone else, step back from the programme because of an inability to delay gratification and learn to budget, was tough.
