Over three days (22-24 May 2015) the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s (NMF) Board of Trustees and senior management went into retreat to review the organisation’s five year (2013-2018) strategic plan in light of rapidly changing contexts. Robust state of the nation and state of the organisation analyses informed the deliberations.
The Board affirmed the strategic direction adopted in 2013 and endorsed the plan’s core objectives, namely:
- To elevate the NMF from a utilised resource on the life and times of Nelson Mandela to the trusted voice on his life and times.
- To elevate the NMF from a respected convenor of dialogue on critical social issues to the preferred convenor of dialogue on such issues.
- To elevate the NMF from donor-dependency to self-sustainability (with substantial resource mobilisation capacity for programmes).
- To elevate the NMF’s corporate brand identity.
- To elevate the Nelson Mandela International Day campaign by expanding its reach internationally.
- To elevate the NMF as a site of excellence in governance through continuing development and enhancement.
The Board reiterated the Mission of the NMF as “Turning the Ideals of Nelson Mandela into Action” as an enduring anchor for all we do.
Rapidly changing contexts require the NMF to focus its work more intensely in the memory-dialogue nexus, expand communication of its work both internally and externally, address directly the growing narrative of a failed ‘1994 project’ in which Nelson Mandela’s legacy is implicated, and intensify its memory-dialogue interventions in the following focus areas:
- Poverty and inequality
- Race and identity, with a special focus on xenophobia
- Youth alienation
- Land and traditional leadership
- Reckoning with oppressive pasts
- Freedom of information
- Institutions and democracy-building
The NMF should maintain capacity to address urgent immediate issues on an ad hoc basis within a strong frame defined by the Mandela legacy as articulated in the ideals expressed in South Africa’s Constitution.
The Board determined that the NMF is under-capacitated in three areas – dialogue oversight, analysis and evaluation, and physical facility usage – and mandated recruitment to secure the required capacity. It further determined that expansion of the NMF’s physical facility should be investigated with a view to securing stronger alignment between vision and capacity.