Launched: 3 years, 9 months ago Members: 2938 CVs: 2095 Branches: 8 Jobs & offers: 232 Trained volunteers: 111 Details
Our unemployed volunteers have helped over 200 people find work since we launched in August 2018. Even if you're not looking for work, sign up to add your voice to our movement.
Search and Employ our Conscientious Work-Seeking Members
Candidates at no charge to employers and recruiters. Run at no charge for and by the unemployed.
Launched on 13 August 2018, OfW uses grassroots community organising, campaigns and advocacy to alleviate unemployment. Our model is to organise communities in high unemployment areas to run their own branches that both support the unemployed in their search for work and endeavour to bring more work to the local area.
Our branches are open to the unemployed of ALL ages, educations, abilities and criminal records and act like free job centres to connect the unemployed directly to employers from where they live (always for free).
As a movement our goals are to increase the number of jobs in South Africa and the alleviation of the experience of being unemployed, including better treatment by employers and recruiters. South Africa has one of the highest rates of unemployment in the world and yet the voices of the unemployed are almost never heard in sites of planning like the Jobs Summit and Nedlac.
Our article in the Daily Maverick describing the 2020 State of Nation Address as having inadequate and underfunded ideas to combat the unemployment crisis received a response in the same publication from the private office of the President.
We got behind the city-wide organising effort and five of our volunteers launched their area's community action network.
OfW played a role in formalising the partnering of neighbourhoods across the city, starting with Gugulethu and Sea Point. Read more in Pamela Silwana's piece on Daily Maverick.
Our branches are all run by local unemployed volunteers. Members are encouraged to become more active job-seekers and to get involved in bringing more work to their local area. Read about our member tiers and incentives.
Wherever we open branches, we train local unemployed volunteers to staff them. Our aim is to organise community branches that are capacitated to find novel solutions in local conditions. At the same time, branches are supported centrally by sharing the experiences, successes and failures of other branches.
Because they are situated in City of Cape Town sites (predominantly libraries) and are volunteer run, branches operate at a next-to-zero monthly cost.
Most members come to our branches because they are situated near their homes and because our tools can improve their chances of finding work. CVs they create on our website (with help from volunteers) are concise, well structured and have been honed by feedback from employers. Volunteers are trained to check member CVs and also to run our two main workshops: getting your CV to 100+ employers a week and dealing with hard interview situations.
Our branches are places where the unemployed can face the daily challenges of job-seeking together, making the search feel less solitary.
We have also started to work towards organising informal workers in their area in order to increase the amount of work done in high unemployment areas. Organising informal workers can help
| In employment | 14.9m (38% of working age) |
| Not in employment | 24.7m (62% of working age) |
| Needing work | 20.0m (51% of working age) |
| Strict unemployment | 7.8m (34% of workforce excluding discouraged) |
| Broad unemployment | 11.1m (43% of workforce including discouraged) |
| Country | Unemployed | Employed of Ages 15-64 | |
| S Africa | 34% | 38% | |
| Brazil | 14% | 54% | |
| Belgium | 6% | 64% | |
| Germany | 4% | 77% | |
| India | 6% | 56% | |
| Thailand | 1% | 72% | |
| Tunisia | 16% | 44% | |
| World | 5% | 67% | |
| (World Bank and International Labour Organisation various periods, Stats SA QLFS21Q2) | |||
Support the organising efforts of our unemployed volunteers to achieve job creation, everyday help in our branches for the unemployed public. Donations to OfW are tax deductible. Find out more here.
Can you commit for 3 months to helping a branch achieve its goals of bringing jobs to the local area and helping members search for work. We would ask you to spend on average one hour a week at the branch in order to better grasp the issues on the ground.
We're always in need of laptops. Any laptop up to 12 years old is usually fine. While everything our members can do on our website is mobile phone friendly, some don't have phones at all. However, even the best smartphones aren't as convenient as using a computer to search, update CVs and for our volunteers to run the branch.
If you have a laptop to donate, we'll wipe it completely, install the Ubuntu operating system and get it ready to improve our members chances of finding work.
Why not use the search above to hire nannies, handymen and women, security guards and many more.
Unemployment is such a huge and multi-factor problem, we can use all the help we can get. Other ways to help us can be found here.
The movement is run first and foremost by its many unemployed volunteers who are trained to run the branches that are within walking distance of where they live.
OfW was founded by Ayal Belling in collaboration with Luke Jordan on 13 August 2018 and was incorporated as a nonprofit in May 2019. Keren Ben Zeev joined Belling and Jordan at incorporation as a director of OfW. In September 2020, Pamela Silwana, a volunteer at our Gugulethu branch, replaced Jordan as a director. The board centralises and helps coordinate the branches and advocacy.
All three directors are currently acting pro bono and the movement has been funded from inception until January 2020 by Ayal Belling in his personal capacity. Small donations have been received since.
Previously worked in finance and tech in London and Cape Town. Studied applied mathematics at the University of Cape Town and real estate investment at Cass Business School in London.
Pamela Silwana started as volunteer staff at OfW's Gugulethu branch. She is the admin and founder of the Gugulethu community action network - part of Cape Town Together and is a fellow of a programme at the University of the Western Cape that is studying the response to Covid-19. She has been a peer facilitator at the National Youth Development Agency and Khulisa Social Solutions, has done fieldwork and admin for UCT and University of Stellenbosch. She also does occasional tutoring and childcare work.
Deputy director and programme manager at Heinrich Böll Foundation South Africa (HBFSA) which is affiliated to the German Green Party. HBFSA fosters democracy and upholds human rights and takes action to prevent the destruction of the global ecosystem. She holds a local economic development masters from London School of Economics.