Consulting for  NGO’s and Public Initiatives

“It would be unlikely that Christ would be on the side of those that ostracise people based on their race, gender or sexual orientation, making them aliens, banning them from the household of God”

       Desmond Tutu, Foreword in Aliens in the household of God

I consult regularly for NGO’s and Public Initiatives. I have acted as a consultant to the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation, an NGO based in Cape Town that protects and promotes the legacy of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu. The overall purpose of my involvement as a consultant was to establish how to best align the research component of one of their programs with the mission and vision statements of the Foundation. 

I also consulted for the Artscape Theatre Centre, Cape Town on disability.  The challenge is to incorporate the moral insights generated by a feminist ethic of care in opening a space for people with disabilities and to accept the notion of care with its focus on nurture, relationship, trust and the emphasis on the concrete, particular other. Art opens up a space for expression and, at the same time, the creation of images of pride and strength, in direct opposition to ideas of helplessness and dependency. The disability arts movement empowers people with disabilities to claim the right to be “equal but different”. People with disabilities have the same challenge as non-disabled people to make meaning of their lives in their concrete life-worlds, through a process of embodied sensing. They may not be able to find the words for their experiences, and non-disabled others want to fill the bodily experiences of disabled people with their own loaded words. People with disabilities do not only have a disabled body but are full persons in the bodies that they are, no matter the nature of the disability. They still have the full capacity to make meaning through their bodies, sensing the world within and around them.