One Minute for Every Year: How 2U's Cape Town Office Spent Mandela Day in Salt River

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.