Good ideas

Die beiden Ideen, die wir hier vorstellen, haben eins gemeinsam: Sie wollen unser Leben verbessern oder zumindest leichter machen.

Full marks to…

…Smart Works, for helping to prepare unemployed women for job interviews. Once a woman has a confirmed interview, she visits Smart Works for a two-hour dressing and coaching session. During the first hour, the client meets with two volunteer stylists. She gets a free, interview-appropriate outfit that she is allowed to keep. The second hour is a coaching session to help the jobseeker prepare for her interview.

Smart Works has been in the news recently. The Duchess of Sussex, formerly Meghan Markle, is a patron of the charity. The day before London Fashion Week opened in September, she announced the launch of “Smart Set”, a collection of clothes for women to wear at work. The clothes and accessories are available at several well-known shops. Each time a piece from the collection is bought in one of these shops, a corresponding piece is given to Smart Works.

The Duchess hopes the new collection will raise the quality of clothes offered to the women who visit Smart Works. Up to now, the clothes and accessories given to the jobseekers had been donated by people or brands. “These women deserve to feel their best,” the dutchess said at the launch. https://smartworks.org.uk

Full marks to…

…Friendship Bench,

for improving the mental well-being of thousands of Zimbabweans.

Kufungisisa means “thinking too much” in the Shona language. The term is used to describe depression, from which a quarter of the Zimbabwean population suffer. But there are only 13 psychiatrists to serve the more than 14 million Zimbabweans. The Friendship Bench “is filling that gap we have in providing affordable care,” Prosper Chonzi, director of health for the City of Harare, told The Guardian.

The Friendship Bench project provides help by training health workers, called “grandmothers”, to sit on park benches and listen to people’s stories. “The grandmothers enable that patient to select a specific problem to focus on, and they help them get through it,” explains Dr Dixon Chibanda, co-founder of the project. The people who regularly sit with the grandmothers are five times less likely to report suicidal thoughts, according to Dr Chibanda.

In the three years since it began, the Friendship Bench model has been adopted in many cities across Africa. It has been introduced in several Canadian cities as well.

www.friendshipbenchzimbabwe.org