The Bertha Foundation | Grantees

"The whole idea is to help people understand how to move from the crisis intervention stage, which has driven most of the interventions, and to work toward a long-term sustainable impact on the education system as a whole so that we emerge with an education system that performs."

- Linda Vilakazi, CEO

"After my business failed, TBP taught me basic business skills and gave me knowledge of running my business and now am confident that as my business is growing again I will be able to manage my business successfully."

- Zuzeka Mbewu, Local Business Owner

"Our Social Justice Institute (SJI) initiative will expand on our decades of experience training the “next generation of people’s lawyers” and inspire and train legions of law students to seek careers in social justice law."

- Vince Warren, Executive Director

"My goal as a journalist is to break the sound barrier, to expand the debate, to cut through the static and bring forth voices that are shut out. It is the responsibility of journalists to go to where the silence is, to seek out news and people who are ignored, to accurately and clearly report on the issues- issues that the corporate, for-profit media often distort, if they cover them at all."

- Amy Goodman, Broadcast Journalist

"I am convinced that Equal Education is one of the most important new civil society formations in South Africa. It is addressing inequality and poor quality in education - two of the critical fault lines in our society - and it is also building a new generation of youth leadership based on non-racialism, non-sexism, freedom, equality and integrity."

- Zackie Achmat, Board Member

"Share your idea, tell people about it. In the most positive sense ‘disown’ it. For it is only by unleashing your idea from the anchor in your mind and from the clutches of your sense of ownership that it grows and develops and becomes real."

- Charles Maisel, CEO

"In some ways art can change the world. Art is not supposed to change the world - to change practical things - but to change the perceptions. Art can change the way we see the world. Art can create an energy. Actually the fact that art cannot change things makes it a neutral place for exchanges and discussions, and then enables you to change the world."

- JR, Director

"My dream of studying at Wits university became a reality through KYP."

- Letsika Sebakeng, 1st Year University Student

"If it was not for an organisation like the LRC, many, if not most of our clients would not have had access to legal assistance. It is very rewarding to know that we are a part of an organisation that since 1979 has used the law as a tool to bring about social, political and to an extent economic change through the types of cases it takes up and it’s other programmes."

- Zeenat Sujee, Bongumusa Sibiya and Kgaogelo Nchaupe, Candidate Attorneys

"At Link Media, we connect an increasingly global community to powerful documentaries, news and cultural perspectives from around the world. Together with committed partners, we engage, inform and inspire viewers to create change at home and abroad."

- Karen Stevenson, Link Media, President and CEO

"Women entrepreneurs ...wealth creators rather than consumers of goods and services..."

- Lillian Masebenza, CEO

"We believe in empowering people to realize their potential. Our aim is to build up marginalized populations that the rest of the world has routinely ignored. From sex workers who are routinely abused to indigenous, illiterate foresters whose homes are being destroyed - we're able to help those most vulnerable build their resources, skills, abilities and networks to further protect themselves."

- Allie Hoffman, CEO

"Sometimes a film makes history; it doesn't just document it. Such is the case with Granito, the astonishing new film by Skylight PIctures. Part political thriller, part memoir, Granito takes us through a riveting, haunting tale of genocide and justice that spans four decades, two films, and in many ways, Yates's own career."

- Cara Mertes, Sundance Documentary Program Director

"As to the wonderful work of STEPS, I must concede that from all the resources from learning we have employed in classroom and informal settings over the last 15 years, your productions have made quite a significant contribution to improved quality learning experiences."

- Theophilus van Rensburg Lindzter, Learning Academy Worldwide, Director

"The Institute’s activities are diverse, but they are united by a simple idea: to give artists, at key points in the creative process, the advice, support, and, above all, the protection to tell their stories in their authentic voices."

- Robert Redford, President and Founder

"Ubuntu recruits and train only from the communities in which we work. The Bertha Foundation supports our belief that we need to look after the health and wellbeing of our employees in the same way that we look after the children we work with in our programs. The benefits are clear: we have a fantastic, hard-working staff that brings passion and care and commitment to every aspect of their interactions. Any fortune 400 CEO will tell you that to build a strong company you must invest in your employees. The non-profit sector must stop undermining itself and begin to invest in its own institutional capacity building. BUILD is a model for this approach"

- Jacob Lief, Founder & President

"The Umthombo Youth Development Foundation is an organisation to be championed as addressing the needs of the poorest of the poor, and to be held up as a model"

- Professor Mike Savage, University of Kwa-Zulu Natal

"We are the loose ends, the have nots, the people living in the gutters, the people who will never make it in life, we have come together to create our own family, to have own identity-to create our own space. It's a program that brings all these kind of things together, love, unity, brotherliness, you know family feeling within people who've lost these things. That's the reason why when you look at the name "WeOwnTV" - it literally means this thing belongs to us."

- Arthur Pratt, Sierra Leone Manager

"Working with WITNESS changed the way we imagined film, imagined the power of it. It was something like a shift from looking at the sea to actually swimming in it - we experienced this immersion into the texture, the process, the nuance of film as a new language we could communicate in."

- Bharati Chaturvedi, Chintan Executive Director