Helping people to overcome a poverty mindset

The church has a long history of supporting the poor through economic upliftment.

It all starts with education and training, and it can be as seemingly mundane as learning how to make excellent coffee.

Founded in 2014 as a project of the Leva Foundation, the Red Band Academy trains unemployed youth to be worldclass baristas through teaching life skills and how to make good coffee.

Early on we discovered something valuable from talking to employers.

They are not looking for trained cashiers, merchandisers, drivers or baristas.

They are looking for people who have character.

People who arrive on time and have a good attitude.

Just before we started our first class of baristas I was given some advice by the amazing Ena Richards, who founded Work 4 a Living (W4AL).

“If you only teach people skills you are wasting your time and setting them up to fail,” she said.

Just that statement shifted our thinking. We introduced W4AL as a phase one course to our Red Band Barista Academy before we even started with coffee.

Now the non-profit W4AL has training centres around the world.

The training emphasises the practical and soft skills that are essential to succeeding in the working and business world.

W4AL training is two weeks, just 52 hours, and for 52 hours we address mindset.

Through it we change mindsets so that people are receptive to skills, receptive to education, receptive to career counselling and receptive to business training. Without that we would fail.

That’s our experience.

Even people with good ideas consistently fail if they have the wrong mindset.

So we address three things before our students start pouring coffee.

First is a poverty mindset, which says “I am poor, I will always be poor, I cannot change, I am not able to find a job, there are no jobs, I can’t change my circumstances, my parents are poor, I don’t have money for bus fare”.

The poverty mindset says “I am not able and I am not prepared to change”.

There is the perception that some people are born lazy, but actually it’s the product of a bad routine learnt often from poor role models.

We’ve found if you can change someone’s routine for just two weeks, you can change a mindset and spark a passion.

Unemployed youth are not disinterested people. They are just in need of a rewiring that will open up their future.

Every nation or group of people should ask themselves how we have landed up in our present situation.

Why is there so much poverty? Why such a big gap between rich and poor?

One of the things would be a fatherless generation, or a political system like apartheid, or an educational system that affects your mindset by only focusing on outcomes and ignoring character.

If you put all these ingredients in a pot together you end up with what we are producing in our country at present — young people who are totally unprepared for the world of work.

This is why so many of our unemployed youth start by being disadvantaged by many things which are not necessarily their fault.

The second is entitlement. This is a huge barrier to economic freedom.

Questions we often encounter are: “Who’s going to give me a job? Who’s going to give me a house?”

We tell them: “If you want a government house this is the wrong course for you.”

The goal should be to build your own house. Not some house which you’ve been given.

People need to understand that they are owed nothing. It’s not normal to sit at home.

Just that change of thinking gets people moving. The gears start shifting.

The third is excellence — excellence in everything you do.

Excellence has nothing to do with your circumstances, rich or poor.

We show people a level of excellence which is within their reach. This has been instrumental is motivating people towards action.

People who are self-managed are valuable people.

They are valuable to the employer.

We keep asking questions and encourage people to question their world view.

Why is it OK to not have a job?

You have to first fix the mindset and then you can give him an opportunity.

I think a lot of employers or employed people are frustrated because they say they have given people an opportunity before and then they mess it up, or they don’t know what to do with it, or they don’t appreciate it.

I’ve heard employers say “ungrateful people”, but have discovered it’s not that people are lazy.

They are actually stuck in their mindset and don’t know how to respond to an opportunity in the way that someone coming from a more supportive background would.

We want to develop people who are full of hope, but that hope has to translate into action.

Otherwise, what are we? People who are empowered but are sitting around at home doing nothing is a recipe for civil unrest.

Our success is not when someone has completed a course. It’s when people have found a job, started a business or gone back to school or university to get educated.

We want to enter people into the economy.

We are not interested in just running training programmes. We want to address poverty.

We want to be able to look at a community and in 10 years’ time be able to say something is different. People are working.

If you are an employer and looking for staff, please reach out to us and interview the people who have completed one of our programmes.

There is no charge. We are a non-profit free talent recruitment office.