Benchmarks Foundation community monitors first online based meeting

08 May 2020
Olebogeng Motene

Today we had a first successful digital meeting with 29 participants from Limpopo, Mpumalanga, North West, Gauteng and Free State. This was a way of exploring new ways of organizing as having a physical meeting is prohibited and the world is getting more digital daily.

We unfortunately couldn’t have more participants as we were trailing the Zoom system and our ability to use the platform. We had a target of 35 participants and more showed interest but due device compatibility and signal challenges more than 10 activists who showed interest weren’t able to join the discussion.

We had a fruitful discussion on what are the lessons from the Covid19 pandemic, what should we do as activists to place ourselves in a better position going forward regarding the issue of access to food.

The time allocated proved to have been short and we agreed that there is a need to include more people and have the meetings regularly. We will work on finding ways to sort out the technical challenges faced today, getting more activists to join as we move forward.