Social Impact Designers Programme

Project Overview

The Social Impact Designers (SID) Programme is a youth-led platform developed by Pivot Collective NPC to support emerging changemakers in South Africa to explore social challenges and design community-driven responses.

At its core, SID is grounded in a simple premise: some of the most important thinking and action on social change is already happening within communities. Across South Africa, young people are actively responding to issues such as inequality, health, climate change, and social injustice, often through informal or under-recognised initiatives rooted in their lived experience.

SID creates space for this work to deepen and grow. Through participatory learning, creative practice, and collaborative experimentation, the programme supports young changemakers to develop ideas, build skills, and connect with peers, mentors, and wider networks of support.

Rather than positioning young people as recipients of training, the programme recognises them as knowledge holders and innovators. Their experiences, insights, and practices form the foundation for how the programme is shaped and how learning unfolds within it.

How the Programme Emerged

The Social Impact Designers programme emerged through an initial Social Impact and Participatory Research Internship, a year-long, cohort-based process that brought together emerging changemakers to co-design the foundations of the initiative.

Launched in 2022 with seed support from the Centre for Social Science Research at the University of Cape Town, the internship created space for a small cohort of young people to explore their own pathways into social change while developing community-based projects grounded in their lived realities. The process combined skills-building in participatory research, facilitation, and project design with ongoing reflection, creative experimentation, and collective learning.

Participants worked across a range of themes, including community healing, indigenous identity and heritage, youth leadership, and food security. Alongside developing their individual initiatives, they engaged in shared processes such as reading groups, arts-based workshops, and collaborative research, drawing on both critical theory and lived experience to inform their work.

This phase was not only a space for project development, but for shaping the principles and practices that underpin SID today. Through co-design, dialogue, and experimentation, the cohort contributed to an approach grounded in youth-led inquiry, creative practice, and non-hierarchical learning.

Early engagements with the broader activist community, through spaces such as the Pivot Mobiliser and through collaborations with other like-minded organisations, further informed the programme's development, surfacing key questions around what enables or constrains young people's ability to organise, lead, and sustain social change efforts.

These experiences laid the foundation for SID as it exists today: not as a pre-defined programme, but as a platform that continues to evolve in response to the insights, needs, and practices of the young people it brings together.

How the Programme Is Evolving

The Social Impact Designers programme continues to evolve as a platform for participatory learning, incubation, and community-building.

While earlier iterations of the programme worked with dedicated cohorts of young changemakers, the current phase is focused on sustaining and deepening the ecosystem that emerged through this work. This includes ongoing experimentation with formats, partnerships, and approaches that can support young people to engage in social change in ways that are meaningful and sustainable.

One key strand of this work is Pivot Mobilisers: participatory workshops and dialogues that bring together young activists, organisers, and practitioners. These spaces create opportunities to share experiences, surface common challenges, and build connections across different areas of social change work.

Through these engagements, the programme continues to explore what kinds of support young people need to initiate and sustain their work—from access to resources and networks, to spaces for reflection, learning, and care.