The Uta Bakery is in full swing as the season is changing from spring to summer in South Africa. We are baking 200-300 loaves of bread per day, and as the recent Think Impact Global Development Ambassadors can confirm, the bread is delicious!  Everyday, the bakery staff, Cedrick, Thomas, Nature, and Solani, start the mixer at 4 a.m., and they bake until the smell of fresh bread fills the air. The focus of my project has shifted to the microfinance initiative that seeks to bring social entrepreneurship to the village of Uta.

I am currently working with a group of local volunteers, including bakery staff members, who have formed a committee to design and implement a microloan program. The committee will construct an application process for interested entrepreneurs, and based on the committee’s selection process, small loans will eventually be granted and then recipients will be supported by the committee as they pay back the loans to the microfinance group. The committee has a meeting today, after which I will post an update on our progress!

I have been working at a small bakery here in Atlanta for the past few months, and it has been a good learning experience for me. It has prepared me for early mornings and other important parts of bakery-life. Although working at the register has not given me a lot of exposure to the bread-making part of this work, I have gotten good exposure to the daily grind that is running a successful small business. I woke up today to go to work (as I now know, bakeries have to start the day before the sun rises), and I realized that June is just around the corner! I could not be more excited about the project, which is slowly but surely coming to life! I wanted to reflect on my time working at this bakery, and I have come up with five key lessons that I have learned:

(1) Quality is everything at a bakery.

(2) You have to wake up early, no excuses.

(3) Appearance counts, the bread needs to look good and the bakery too.

(4) You must be consistent- when the bakery is open, bread must be available.

(5) People like sweet treats. Cookies are big sellers.

Team Uta is in training! A group of six girls, Sonia Rao, Emma Shapiro, Adele Williams, Maddie Kane, Emily Martin and me, will be running in the Georgia ING Half-Marathon on March 29th to raise funds for the Uta Bakery Social Entrepreneurship project! The team has set the fundraising goal of each raising $10 per mile that we run, and as a group, we have already raised $480! There is still a long ways to go towards finishing all 13 miles fully-funded, so each team member has asked her friends and family to help her reach the finish line.

This has been a really exciting part of fundraising for the project because it has gotten a lot of different people from all around the country involved. The more people that connect with the Bakery Project and take it into their hearts, the better the Project becomes! Part of what I love about SMRC is its commitment to connecting people, uniting them together in a global commitment to helping the world’s neglected populations in the understanding that we as people are only as healthy as those suffering the most from disease, that we are only as successful as those without opportunities for employment or education can be, because we must demand more! We have to understand that we are all in this together, and that helping one village in Africa become financially independent from government relief really does make the entire world a better place to live in for everyone.

I’m currently working on a couple of fundraising projects. They are all very exciting, especially the Uta Bakery Team running in the Georgia Half-Marathon on March 29th. There are six girls on the team, and each girl has a personal fundraising goal of $10 per mile. We already have two girls who have donors that have agreed to match their total amount raised, and we can’t wait to run for social entrepreneurship! If you’d like to sponsor a mile or two (or even someone’s entire thirteen!), please donate on the bakery page and help us run for a purpose next month! The project is also consistently raising additional funds each month with the Spare Change for Social Change campaign.

When SMRC members travel to Uta in a couple of weeks, they’ll be getting a lot of important information for the project about its possibilities. The group will assess the Uta bakery as the Buffelshoek Trust established it, and then I’ll be able to keep directing the project in terms of how the money raised will go towards the bakery’s improvement and how it will help perpetuate an entrepreneurial spirit in Uta and the surrounding villages by setting a successful example.

I am trying to learn everything that I can about micro-enterprise and micro-finance right now, in the goal of having a solid enough understanding by June of how a small business is run to make the project as successful as possible. I’m also working at a small bakery here in Atlanta to see first-hand how a small business is effectively run.

What ideas do you have in mind?

The past two months have been full of challenges and rewards for the Uta Bakery Social Entrepreneurship Project.  I have focused primarily on fundraising during the fall and winter, and I am very excited about the research and design part of the program to which I will dedicate the majority of my time in the spring.

Learning about fundraising has been an incredible and valuable experience.  Fundraising was a field about which I knew very little before I began my journey as a Student Movement Fellow, and I quickly learned that it takes a lot of time and careful thought and preparation to carry out.  Some of the most successful fundraising events for the Project have been: the Uta Bakery Bake Sale at Colorado College, the SMRC 100 Movement, and the Spare Change for Social Change Penny Campaign.  The Bakery Project has started to plan many exciting upcoming events, including a Uta Bakery Team running to raise funds in the Georgia Half Marathon, a Casino Night at Emory, a Lose Your Shoes Barefoot Soccer Tournament at Emory, and much more!

As I am designing the Bakery Project, I have realized that I have a lot to learn about business and also baking.  I am, therefore, hoping to get a job at a bakery near Emory next semester. I am also planning on meeting with Emory professors in the business school and in the development field in order to learn as much as I can about social entrepreneurship. I recently met with Emory professor Peter Brown to discuss some of the inherent difficulties in doing development work in rural South Africa, and I look forward to other invaluable meetings like this as the Project progresses.