Dear HBUFC family!
This time of year is a great opportunity to reflect and celebrate the impact that our organisation is having. It seems crazy that we’ve been around as a Non-Profit Organisation for 10 years. Wow, time flies when you’re having fun!
Each time we sit and reflect to put these reports together it’s clear that the scale of impact we achieve is continually growing. The impact we make in our community is substantial and the majority of our impact is off the field. Despite being just a football ‘club’. Because of the success of our off field programmes, there is a growing demand for support from beneficiaries and other partner organisations in Hout Bay.
Perhaps the why of what we do isn’t always so clear.
Hout Bay is a divided neighbourhood that represents a microcosm of South Africa. We face significant challenges that threaten our community and environment. Drug abuse, particularly among youth, is widespread, fuelling health issues, family breakdowns, and crime. High unemployment, especially in informal settlements, exacerbates poverty and limits opportunities, particularly for young people.
Our objectives have always been the same:
As a direct response to our community needs that we identified here in Hout Bay:
Through football we strive to uplift our youth through mentorship and unite our community & inspire through success and leadership.
It wasn’t the community needs that we identified first.
It was the opportunity, or rather the tool – our passion for Football.
Those games we were playing then, that started this whole journey, we’re still playing now. And it’s football that brings us together and keeps us together. Depressingly many of those problems we identified 10 years ago in our beautiful community are still problems now, and in some cases those problems are bigger than ever. The trouble is while at home here in Hout Bay crime rises, education stagnates, unemployment grows and those old systemic social divides seem to widen instead of narrow, the global environment has also shifted.
2024 has seen a couple of our generous longer term donors phase out their contributions, re-focussing their efforts on causes outside of our small community here at the tip of Africa. However our needs here are growing. Our motto “More than a team. More than a game” perfectly sums up who we are and what we do. We’re a community football club with big dreams on and off the field. And we want to do more.
Today’s challenging climate has presented us with an opportunity to review our processes. In the 10 years that we’ve been learning and growing we’ve developed substantial insight into effective interventions into our community. On and off the field. So we look forward to 2025. Our goal is to really focus the efficiency and the impact of our brilliant programmes while aligning the 2 aspects of HBUFC that have always been the most challenging to marry.
How can we run successful high performance athletic programmes, while focussing and growing our community engagement and social impact?
Like a Community of Excellence!
How indeed? We need to ensure operational excellence, efficiency and social impact across a broad range of needs that often appear completely disconnected.
The answer has been with us all along. Come and visit us and wander through our gardens, between our offices and classrooms, into the gym, the canteen and the kitchen at our beautiful Dream Factory and the answer is in the energy you’ll feel.
See our coaches work, or watch our 1st teams play a league game. Or even watch us play amongst ourselves on a Friday afternoon and it’s the same. There’s a contagious spirit. A positive energy. A can do attitude.
It’s been there since the very beginning 10 years ago. It’s the very reason we started. It’s the reason we’re still going 10 years later.
It’s our culture. We have a very clear and very strong culture within our organisation, but none of ‘it’ was formally documented. ‘It’ was happening everywhere all of the time but none of us really knew how.
For the last 6 months we’ve been on a journey as a leadership team. Through meetings and workshops between coffee or a social game, we reflected on our organisation’s values and culture. Most of us read the culture code (an amazing book by Daniel Coyle), or at least watched the YouTube short version..
The idea was to build a foundation and a process drawing from our 10 years of work
(and play) with a focus on our organisational culture and values to really align our efforts across all of our programmes and our people. Since Easter we’ve run workshops and values camps with staff, players and coaches to help build a united understanding of our key values, our 4 I’s:
Integrity, Intelligence, Individuality & Intensity.
These values should be seen in everything we do.
And it’s with these key values that we assess everything we do.
Integrity, Intelligence, Individuality & Intensity.
From our elite athletic programmes shooting for the Hollywoodbets
& PSL leagues to our Employment hub and schools programmes.
We are a community of excellence!
We’re connected by a laser sharp super focused straight line that’s a process of accountability, of efficiency, and of impact always assessing against our 4 I’s. Our culture creates environments for people to flourish, to reach for their dreams and our values system develops good, open minded, hardworking and kind individuals that want to help serve and grow our beautiful community.
It makes no difference if that’s preparing for a career on the field, through our employment hub, or in a community project, the impact is the same.
We help develop great people.
Please take your time and explore our impact in 2024. We would really appreciate it if you can support our programs and initiatives, every little bit will make a difference. Helping a small project like ours on the tip of South Africa may seem like your contribution is just a drop in the ocean, on a sunny shore, but the impact one small contribution makes here in Hout Bay resonates through
entire families and across communities.
The beginning of summer saw an invasion of small ‘Bluebottles’ on Hout Bay beach. At first glance just a mess of thousands of small insignificant jelly fish. Otherwise known as the Portuguese Man o’ War, it’s not a jellyfish fish at all but actually a colonial siphonophore, a highly effective marine organism made up of a colony of specialised, interconnected individuals called zooids that work together as a single organism, each performing specific functions such as feeding,
movement or reproduction.
Just like us, a community pulling together for the greater good. Each small individual playing a vital role. At the end of this year’s impact report we are sharing just some of our inspirational individual stories. Every year HBUFC is literally hundreds of these stories impacting families, growing communities and driving positive change forward. Thank you for being a part of the never ending journey.
The goal is love
Team HBUFC
