Powering ahead for a better tomorrow

SUZANNE BELLING

But the role she chose for herself over the past 24 years was a real-life one in many successful ventures and organisations in the non-profit world.

Founder and CEO of Tomorrow Trust – with the help of Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa – Feinberg is excited to see the project succeed, culminating in a gala banquet celebrating 10 years since the trust was founded.

With 300 people at the festivities at the Sandton Urban Tree earlier this month, reigning Miss World, Rolene Strauss, announced that the “Miss World’s Beauty with a Purpose” campaign would join forces with Cell C and Tomorrow Trust to train up 100 new medical doctors in South Africa.

Feinberg said: “Having Miss World join us on this journey is an honour, as she is not only smart, educated and beautiful, but also committed to the success of our children and youth in South Africa.

“Through education, psycho-social support, life-skill development and academic support, we (Tomorrow Trust) have managed to achieve outstanding results that show our South African youth are indeed our future to a successful country moving forward,” Feinberg said.

The trust gives academic support, self-development and computer literacy to blacks and a few whites (including a couple of Jewish students). The trust has only a 2,5 per cent dropout rate, compared to a 50 per cent dropout rate among other university students.

The students are mostly orphaned or vulnerable.

“We now have 200 alumni, including doctors, lawyers and actuaries and 11 Golden Key members (for outstanding academic achievement).

“We teach our kids to give back,” she said.

Born in Springs, Feinberg moved at an early age to Johannesburg where she attended Saxonwold Primary School and the Johannesburg School for Art, Music and Ballet.

She came back to South Africa from LA in 1986 and after the birth of her daughter, Jade (28), “wanted to be a hands-on mom, so I opened a beauty salon at home”.

Later, when Brent (now 25) was born, Feinberg started “moving into the non-profit sector as a volunteer for Hospice”.

In 1995, she began working for Friends of Yad Vashem and started the Survivors of the Shoah project, through the Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Visual History Institute.

“I worked so my children could live in a better world. I had to be involved.”

Founding director of the Apartheid Museum, she sat on the Human Rights Commission for Education and later became founder/CEO of the Tolerance Foundation, teaching over 70 000 children life skills based on history, such as apartheid, the Holocaust, Rwanda and Kosovo.

She is an Ashoka fellow and has studied at the Harvard Kennedy School of International Studies.

During her time with the Tolerance Foundation, she started working closely with government. Working 24/7, “I became burnt out. It was a changing South Africa in 2004, with HIV/Aids, poverty and a reduced economic situation.”

In 2004 she found it difficult to raise funds for the foundation. “Mothers were dying of HIV/Aids and kids were living in child-headed households.

“The danger zone was when kids were leaving school early or dropping out. And the United Nations started saying that if kids didn’t get a proper education, they would turn to drugs, crime, alcoholism, or become HIV positive.

“I met Cyril Ramaphosa at a function. He later called me and became the very first trustee of the Tomorrow Trust.”

The trust deals with children from grade R through to university until they become employable, well-rounded, self-empowered individuals, who have been released from the cycle of poverty.

Feinberg’s CV is impressive. She is the author of three best-sellers in South Africa – “Tomorrow”, “A Mother’s Legacy” and “Raising Wisdom”.

She was, among an impressive list of awards, runner-up of the South African Social Entrepreneur of the Year, winner of the Most Influential Women in Business and Government – Welfare Sector for 2009/2010, selected in the top four Ernst & Young World Social Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2011, winner of the Exemplary Women in Leadership award in 2013, and winner of the Global CSR Excellence and Leadership Award last year.