In South Africa, we celebrate Women’s Month in August, commemorating the August 9, 1956, march led by women of colour against draconian laws enforced by the country’s erstwhile apartheid regime.

The resounding call by the hundreds of thousands of women who participated in this protest across the country was: “Wathint’abafazi, wathint’imbokodo!” (“You strike a woman, you strike a rock!” — isiZulu).

Each year, the media in South Africa run editorial campaigns centred around women. They focus either on the scourge of gender-based violence and femicide in the country, or run campaigns highlighting women of worth; noteworthy individuals who are on the top of their game: captains of industry, CEOs, sportswomen, and the like.

But in 2024, IOL decided instead to focus on the most forgotten group of women in our society — the homeless and housing insecure.

In 2016, as digital editor of the Cape Argus — one of the oldest English-language newspapers in South Africa at more than 160 years old — I participated in an editorial campaign  called The Dignity Project.

It highlighted the struggles of Cape Town’s homeless population, bringing to light their challenges, putting them on the front page of the newspaper every day for three weeks, elevating them out of the shadows, and answering their desire as expressed in our very first meeting we had with a small group of them when they shared with us The Homeless Person’s Charter: “We want to be recognised as human.”

Reinventing dignity 

As the editor of IOL, the second-largest news platform in South Africa, I decided to relaunch The Dignity Project in August 2024, focusing on the homeless women in the three major metropolitan areas of South Africa: Cape Town, Durban, and Johannesburg.

We would seek them out and simply tell their stories; in many ways, humanising them and reminding our audiences that these women are exactly like all other women in our country — the only difference was their homelessness.

Thus, the Elevate HER campaign was born. But we didn’t only want to highlight their stories; we also wanted to make a small material difference in their lives.

Zurina Morgan, IOL’s marketing lead, and I sat down with a faith-based organisation that works closely with the housing insecure. We explained our intention to collect sanitary towels to run in tandem with our editorial campaign and to later distribute the proceeds of the collection drive to organisations in need.

The answer we got in response floored me: “How do you expect these women to use the sanitary towels? No one donates underwear …”

So we broadened the scope of our collection drive. We set a target to collect at least 100 Dignity Packs per region, consisting of sanitary towels, face cloths, soap, razors, toothbrushes, toothpaste, underwear, and socks to be distributed at the conclusion of the campaign. Our goal was to make up a total of 300 Dignity Packs.

Our readers, clients, and partners responded in kind. One afternoon, Zurina and I received a call from a supplier who asked us to go downstairs to receive a delivery. We were expecting a handful of items to be dropped off by a DoorDash delivery rider. Instead, we reached the reception area of our office building to find a delivery truck with boxes of soap and toothpaste.

One of my staff’s parents donated boxes of goods to our cause. A retailer jumped in and supplied us with razors. A group of Chinese business owners asked us how many face cloths and packs of sanitary towels we required, and then sent us double what we had requested.

The outpouring of support was truly heart-wrenching.

By the end of the campaign, we had managed to collect enough goods to create more than 600 Dignity Packs. The question now remained as to how to distribute them from our head office in Cape Town to our offices in Durban and Johannesburg.

Then Zurina received a call. A gentleman on the other end of the line, who preferred to remain anonymous, asked her to send him the invoice for courier services. Less than an hour later, it was paid, and arrangements for collection were made.

Changing lives, one story at a time

But perhaps the most incredible thing that happened as a result of this campaign was the impact our editorial coverage had on the lives of the women we interviewed and whose stories we told, prominently featured on IOL’s homepage and on the Elevate HER content hub.

The first woman we had interviewed, Patricia Geyser, from Cape Town, told the heartbreaking story of how she didn’t want to live on the streets, and wanted to be reunited with her three children who had been removed from her care years before.

Her video, posted to our TikTok, garnered significant audience attention, but grabbed the attention of someone in particular — a man who had grown up with Patricia in a Western Cape orphanage, and knew the foster family tasked with caring for her three younger children.

When the children were shown the video, they expressed a desire to meet her, as they had thought her deceased. One of the three minor children also asked for a print-out of Patricia’s picture that she could pin inside her wardrobe. IOL facilitated a meeting for the adults to discuss how they would reconnect Patricia with her minor children.

We received another call from a woman named Anerishia a few days later who said something that broke our hearts: “That woman is my mother. I haven’t seen her in 27 years.”

After many conversations with both Anerishia and Patricia separately, we arranged for them to meet. Anerishia came into IOL’s offices with her son — coincidentally also named Lance — to see her mom for the first time since she was just 2 years old.

I led Patricia, who knew nothing of the meeting, into a boardroom where she excitedly told us the identification document she had been waiting for from the Department of Home Affairs had finally arrived, meaning she would finally be able to access some of the indigent government assistance.

Our own minister of home affairs had been notified by one of his senior staffers about IOL’s Elevate HER campaign. Until then, he had not realised the scope of the challenges homeless people face without having access to their identification documents, and had fast-tracked some applications as a result.

With some of my senior editorial leadership in the room with Patricia, including Devereaux Morkel, who guided the editorial team’s storytelling; Kim Kay, who was responsible for sharing these stories across IOL’s social media platforms and distributing the content; and Wendy Dondolo, the intern responsible for bringing Patricia’s story to our audiences, I excused myself to bring Anerishia from my office into the boardroom.

When the two women saw each other, they collapsed into a tearful embrace. In Afrikaans, Anerishia whispered to her mother through heaving sobs: “Mommy, I love you. I forgive you. What’s happened in the past is gone. I love you.”

There wasn’t a dry eye in the room.

By the end of the week, Patricia had been invited to move in with her older daughter, had met her grandchildren for the first time, and reconnected with her older children, whom she had last seen 27 years ago.

This campaign was a true testament to the power of storytelling, the importance of journalism, and a display of the values IOL espouses.

When people ask me why I do the work I do, this is the answer I give them: A well-told story can change lives. 

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