blog

Alex Herz

Having started working at Heart in February, I was incredibly curious about the whole concept of social entrepreneurship in South Africa. In my home country Germany, sustainability and corporate social responsibility are huge topics of this decade and I am very interested in the holistic way of doing business. Companies of every size are implementing CSR respectively, and Sustainability Programs are definitely a positive development and a step into the right direction.

Obviously, there are truly universal challenges that we all have to deal with on a global scale and problems are highly interconnected, which makes systemic thinking so inevitable. However, national and thus cultural challenges are diverse. Coming from an industrialized and developed country, my perspective as a foreigner had to be adjusted to the local situation in many ways. I came to South Africa well informed about its moving history and severe social issues. Nevertheless, hearing or reading about something never comes close to the direct and personal experience. I am very grateful for the opportunity to live in wonderful Cape Town and work at Heart in order to support South Africa’s development at grassroots level. It opens my horizon immensely. It is an intensive time, because this beautiful country has so much to offer on the one hand, on the other hand has so much to deal with.

Enter social entrepreneurship, which goes one step further than CSR usually does, makes social responsibility its core concept of business. Social entrepreneurship enhances business development and tackles social issues at the same time. It demonstrates that doing good business and “doing good” are not mutually exclusive. Heart works for the spread of this business approach by supporting social entrepreneurs in every aspect and phase of development.

It is a great reward to dedicate my time, skills and efforts to the support of social entrepreneurship. Heart gives me the chance to work independently on exiting, most promising projects and challenging topics. It offers an inspirational and interactive work environment at Hubspace with highly skilled, most wonderful and engaged individuals. Trust, respect, a business minded-entrepreneurial spirit, resilience, fun and a lot of love are its cultural core values. Not to forget our daily motivational morning meetings, inspiring coffee & conversation Fridays, awareness film evenings, workshops and NCA! Thursday lunch breaks, where we all come to together to exchange knowledge, opinions and experience.