Every July 18, South Africans mark Mandela Day by giving 67 minutes of their time to public service, one minute for each year Nelson Mandela spent fighting for human rights and social justice. The Nelson Mandela Foundation sets an annual focus for the day. In 2022 it chose food security and climate change, organized around four pillars (Fund, Plant, Feed, Sustain) and a tagline borrowed from Mandela’s own ethic: “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”¹

For employees at 2U’s Cape Town office, “where you are” meant Salt River, the neighborhood surrounding the education technology company’s South African base. The office’s Community Steering Committee built its 2022 Mandela Day programming around initiatives there. Two of the company’s employee networks joined in, the LGBTQIA+ Business Resource Network known as 2Q and the Womxn’s Alliance Network, and together they supported three local organizations: Salt River High School, Pride Shelter Trust, and the Salt River Neighbourhood Gardens initiative.¹

Confronting Period Poverty at Salt River High School

An estimated 3.7 million girls in South Africa can’t afford menstrual hygiene products, and school attendance suffers with it: 30% of girls miss class during their periods, according to researchers at the University of Stellenbosch.¹ A drive collecting sanitary products and underwear for students at Salt River High School was launched by the Womxn’s Alliance Network on Mandela Day 2022. The stated goal: make sure no girl misses a school day or an exam for lack of supplies. The network committed to sustaining the drive beyond the day itself.

Employees also assembled care packs for vulnerable learners at the school. The packs cover basic needs the classroom can’t. The Community Steering Committee made that effort an annual fixture of its Mandela Day calendar.¹

Gardens, Skills, and Volunteer Time Off

The committee’s partnership with Neighbourhood Gardens took a different shape. The initiative is building out a web of community gardens across Salt River, planted for both food and biodiversity, including a vegetable plot at the high school. 2U employees could use the company’s Volunteer Time Off policy to donate professional skills the gardens needed: accounting, web design, and social media. Those who preferred to give money funded seeds, fruit trees, and fynbos, the indigenous plants of the Western Cape.¹

Care Packs and Career Help at Pride Shelter Trust

Legal protections for LGBTQIA+ South Africans haven’t eliminated discrimination based on race, sexual orientation, or gender identity and expression. In that context, 2Q built a sustained relationship with Pride Shelter Trust, a Cape Town refuge for LGBTQIA+ people. Care packs assembled on Mandela Day were donated to the shelter’s residents, and the network opened a longer-term channel: staff can use Volunteer Time Off to help residents develop their resumes.¹

Service as Company Policy

The through-line in all three efforts is education and economic access. Roughly 41% of South Africans between 15 and 29 are neither employed nor in education or training, and that’s the gap 2U Cape Town says it wants to help close in its own community, a few streets from where the company pursues its mission of eliminating the back row in education.¹

The company codifies the impulse in one of its Guiding Principles, “Make Service Your Mission,” and the Cape Town office frames its Mandela Day work as an attempt to live up to the foundation’s larger ask: make every day a Mandela Day.

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Before Collyn Messier’s first day at 2U, their new manager gathered the team to practice pairing “they” with Collyn’s name. Messier, a business analyst at the education technology company’s Maryland headquarters, only learned about it afterward. “I’ve never felt more seen than in that moment,” they said, noting the relief of not having to teach colleagues about pronouns themselves.

Moments like that one trace back to structure. Messier is one of the global leaders of 2Q, the LGBTQIA+ Business Resource Network that 2U employees formed at the start of 2019. The network plans and hosts events, carries member concerns directly to the C-suite, and collaborates with the company’s other employee networks, including the Black Engagement Network and the Womxn’s Alliance Network.¹

A Leadership Bench That Spans Continents

In 2022, 2Q’s global leadership reflected the company’s footprint. Jess Samuels, then a product evangelist on 2U’s boot camp product team working remotely from outside Philadelphia, held the global chair role. Messier held the global advocacy chair, working with 2U’s diversity, equity, and inclusion team on listening sessions and processing spaces that were opened to members whenever news of anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation broke. And in Cape Town, business analyst Mantedieng “Mantis” Mamabolo-Cunningham held a role the network created specifically to keep its decisions honest about geography: global ambassador, a voice in the room for members spread across continents.¹

That spring, 2U signed the Human Rights Campaign’s business statement opposing legislation targeting LGBTQIA+ people, and “Go Forth and PRIDE!” was adopted as the theme for the network’s U.S. Pride programming.²

Belonging, Office by Office

The network’s reach shows up in individual accounts from opposite ends of the company. In Cape Town, benefits manager Sheana Abrahams said, “From the first time I stepped into the 2U Cape Town office, I never ever felt like I needed to hide who I was.”² Michael Krüger, a learning designer who joined 2U after working as a lecturing assistant in philosophy at the University of Stellenbosch, pointed to the company’s policies as the draw: he didn’t have to go through a formal HR process to use his chosen name across the company. “I had never before come across such a trans-inclusive company in our country,” he said.³

In Denver, academic counselor Ren Dawe led a seminar on allyship best practices during the company’s 2022 Pride programming and heard back from people managers planning to fold the material into how they run their teams.³

The Case for Visible Leadership

The leaders themselves are direct about why representation inside a company is a business question. “If you aren’t in the room where decisions are made, then you can’t speak up when it’s needed,” Samuels said. Messier pointed to research linking DEI representation in leadership to higher employee satisfaction and better retention.¹ Mamabolo-Cunningham was candid about the cost of being, in their words, “the only” and “the first” in professional rooms.¹

The clearest sign of how 2Q connects culture to the company’s core business may be its course list. For Pride Month 2022, the network curated 28 online offerings from 2U’s university partners. The list ran from Stanford’s story-based Health Across the Gender Spectrum to inclusive leadership programs from Northwestern, the London School of Economics, and the University of Cape Town.² For a company whose stated mission is eliminating the back row in education, the network made its point in the company’s own medium: a syllabus.