On 25 July 2026, Belle and co.’s Director, Belisa Rodrigues, designed and delivered a pitch workshop for 70 learners at Silvermine Academy in Cape Town, as part of their Entrepreneurs Career Day. The session prepared students to develop and present a same day pitch to a panel of invited judges: “The Dragons”.
The workshop structure and process
The event aimed to stimulate creative thinking and practical problem solving among 14 to 17 year old participants.
After hearing talks from guest speakers representing Bootlegger Coffee Company and the Cape Town Creative Academy, the learners split into collaborative working groups to come up with their business idea. With guidance, each team developed core elements of their venture, including:
A story hook to capture audience attention.
A clear business model and prototype.
A structured funding or support request.
The judging panel and student concepts
The judging panel featured experienced business owners and investors, including Gina Sulprizio (Full Circle Food), Jacques Loftus (Amethyst), Kevin James (GCX), Miguel Netto (Bootlegger), Ingram Casey (Escape + Explore), and Kevin Sibartie (Lineage Invest).
The students presented a range of innovative, creative, and niche business concepts. Ideas included recycled furniture production, specialized hamster accessories, and period product vending machines.
The workshop provided a supportive space for learners to build public speaking confidence and experiment with venture creation. Belle and co. congratulates Silvermine Academy for organizing an impactful event for emerging young entrepreneurs.
Prototyping futures: the 2026 changemaker curriculum for grade 11 learners
If you have been following Belle and co.’s journey with high school learners in 2025, you would be familiar with our social enterprise curriculum. This year, the feedback received from participants shifted focus toward career aspirations and future preparation.
In response to these insights, the Belle and co. team redesigned the curriculum structure. The update moved beyond a routine refresh, resulting in a comprehensive revamp of the session delivery. The central addition to this iteration is the Changemaker’s Workbook.
The changemaker’s workbook and active research
The workbook operates as an activity book and reflective journal. It enables learners to identify personal strengths, skills, and passions, and translate them into career pathways.
As part of this learning experience, participants conducted active research to test their career ideas. Rather than traditional job shadowing, students engaged in practical discovery tasks, including:
Interviewing professionals in their fields of interest.
Researching career definitions and requirements online.
Volunteering with local non governmental organisations.
These activities provided the students with the practical space to prototype their future career directions. The 2026 programme focused specifically on Grade 11 learners. This adjustment addresses the need for early career intervention before the academic demands of Grade 12 become primary.
Adjusted structure and increased momentum
The updated programme was delivered over three consecutive Saturday sessions across February and March 2026. This schedule altered the 2025 format, which included a three month gap between the first and second sessions. The compressed timeline helped participants maintain momentum and improved knowledge recall, allowing the facilitation team to build on previous lessons systematically.
Session learning objectives
Each of the three sessions targeted a specific area of development:
Session 1 objective: Reframe problems into opportunities by mapping unique personal strengths and passions onto a chosen issue, while deepening self empathy through feedback.
Session 2 objective: Develop a resilient mindset by reframing potential failures as data, encouraging experimentation in personal and professional growth, and outlining a small, actionable step to test within two weeks.
Session 3 objective: Define a future path by connecting the prototype idea to a broader purpose, enabling learners to articulate why their work matters, and concluding with a vision board for 2026 and 2027.
A look at the new material
The introduction of the physical workbook changed how students engaged with the content, turning abstract ideas into tangible career plans.
Overall Feedback
The self-reflection feedback forms indicate that the workshops were highly effective in helping learners clarify their career paths, with a strong majority reporting an increase in design thinking awareness and a shift in how they view their futures. Participants consistently highlighted that the collaborative atmosphere and interactive exercises – such as prototyping, brainstorming, and mind mapping – were engaging and well-organised. While most students appreciated the inclusive space where everyone had an opportunity to participate, a few noted that the session felt long or rushed, and some shy individuals requested that facilitators avoid putting them on the spot. Overall, the learners highly valued the supportive, warm energy of the team and expressed that the insights gained made their future career aspirations feel far more achievable.
“In this session I enjoyed new skills a lot and learned what prototype is but today I am think differently about my future.” [Anon 1]
“The session went really well, I enjoyed the session, when we were playing at the beginning… learning more about future careers and what we can do to ensure that our futures are not completely planned but don’t seem as scary anymore.” [Anon 2]
“Me figuring more out about my career I figured more out through one of the Bertha centre members making a link for me.” [Anon 3]
A sneak peak at the new Changemaker’s Workbook and the wonderful facilitation team:
On 4 September, Belle and Co., designed and delivered a co-design session with Alumni of the Healthy Futures programme.
Belle and co. worked with the Bertha Centre at the University of Cape Town to help gather insights to evolve the Healthy Futures programme (a Mastercard Foundation initiative). This initiative supports young health entrepreneurs in Vredenburg, South Africa among other cities around South Africa.
For Vredenburg, the process began with two distinct training phases:
Cohort 1 met in July 2024 for a five day bootcamp facilitated by Bertha Centre.
In September 2025, the Bertha Centre team invited alumni from both cohorts to reunite. The goals were to assess the impact of the training, encourage collaboration between the two groups, and strengthen local networks. Belle and co. was selected to design and lead this reflective session.
Thobeka Poswa from Belle and co. served as the lead facilitator, while the Bertha Centre team supported the group work.
During the workshop, participants mapped out local community assets on a physical map using post it notes. They shared knowledge regarding local infrastructure, training opportunities, and psychosocial support systems available to youth in the area. This exercise helped the Bertha Centre team identify local champions and existing resources to leverage for future youth support.
The outcome
The workshop provided valuable feedback and collaborative design insights. Based on these results, the Bertha Centre team converted the original bootcamp model into a comprehensive, in person academy experience.
Concluding the journey: practical insights and reflections in workshop 3
If you have been following our social enterprise learning journey for high school learners in South Africa, you can revisit the part 1 workshop blog and the part 2 workshop blog.
On Saturday, 2 August 2025, our final workshop transitioned from theory to practice, featuring insights from Buntu Matole, the founder of the social enterprise ABCD Concepts.
Workshop 3 learning objectives
The final session focused on the long term viability and global context of social ventures:
Learning objective 1: Understanding the importance of sustainability in social entrepreneurship.
Learning objective 2: Engaging critically with a social enterprise owner regarding funding and scaling challenges.
Learning objective 3: Introducing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and aligning an enterprise with a specific goal.
Participant reflections from the series
The conclusion of the three part series highlighted the core takeaways shared by the participants:
“We learned about innovation by looking directly at the root cause of a problem.”
“We learned not to focus too much on the problem itself, but rather on how to turn that problem into a solution.”
“We learned to be open and curious, and to constantly try to find new ways to look at things.”
Progressing the journey: innovation and design thinking in workshop 2
If you have been following our journey, you can read about part 1 of our social enterprise workshop series for high school learners in South Africa. On 2 July 2025, the 100 learners returned for the second part of their social enterprise learning journey.
Instead of focusing on the problem, the class shifted attention toward innovation and design thinking to generate a wide range of creative ideas.
Workshop 2 learning objectives
The second session focused on the core components of developing a social venture:
Learning objective 1: Understanding the role of innovation in social change.
Learning objective 2: Introducing the concept of design thinking to solve social problems.
Learning objective 3: Learning how to prototype solutions using storyboarding.
Bringing innovation and systemic problems together
Workshop 2 centered on collaborative group work. Students examined the specific details of their chosen systemic problems and combined these elements to build a functional social innovation.
“Social innovation is the process of developing and deploying effective solutions to challenging and often systemic social and environmental issues in support of social progress.”
The groups worked through the complexities of their problem statements to make their ideas practical. This process required significant effort, and the students successfully presented their concepts to the class.
In workshop 3, we invite a social entreprise founder of ABCD Concepts, Buntu Matole into the room as a living inspirational case study of what the students have been studying. Watch out for part 3 of the series.
What happens when you bring 110 of South Africa’s brightest young minds together for an intense, competition-style leadership sprint? Pure magic.
UCT GSB plenary venue for the 2.5-day intensive workshop in Cape Town. Source: SBF
Belle and Co. was thrilled to co-design and facilitate an immersive, high-energy workshop for the university and diploma-level laureates of Students for a Better Future (SBF). Held over two and a half days at the UCT Graduate School of Business Conference Centre, six of our facilitators ran parallel sessions across two floors to guide these future leaders.
To prepare the laureates for the real world, we split them into teams of eight. Each team had to tackle one of three critical real-world challenge areas:
Health & Wellness: Exploring a future of telemedicine, biotechnology, and proactive, preventative care.
Sustainable Development & the Green Economy: Diving into eco-entrepreneurship, circular economy principles, and green tech.
Tech-driven Social Change & AI: Cultivating empathy and design thinking to lead digital advocacy and social innovation.
To replicate the pressure of a professional environment, teams were awarded points daily for their teamwork, problem statements, and final presentations. We tracked everything on a live leaderboard, culminating in final awards for the top team leaders and overall winners.
The students also received invaluable mentorship from industry heavyweights. Dr. Mzamo Masito (Canva Africa Leader and former Google Africa CMO) shared insights on visual storytelling, while Orion Herman (founder of Liquid Gold) explained how he uses nature-based bioconversion to turn waste into worth.
By empowering these exceptional young people with an entrepreneurial, caring mindset, we aren’t just teaching leadership – we are shaping the active problem solvers South Africa needs.
Facilitator, Belisa Rodrigues of Belle and Co. Source: SBF
Read more about SBF and SASLI here:
SBF (Students for a Better Future) is the overarching scholarship programme, while SASLI (Susan & Andreas Struengmann Leadership Initiative) is a prestigious, 3-year leadership development programme for extraordinary SBF scholarship recipients that builds on the foundation provided by the SBF scholarship. SBF begins in Grade 6, nurturing high-potential children through high school and university, and SASLI is the post-matric stage for the most exceptional scholars, preparing them for leadership roles in the workforce.
On Saturday, 15th March, Belle and co., working alongside the Bertha Centre team and the Student Development Unit at the University of Cape Town, designed and delivered part 1 or 3 workshops focused on social entrepreneurship for 100 matriculants from various schools across South Africa.The second and third workshop will take place in July and August 2025 (blogs to follow).
The learners, who are part of an extra curriculum Saturday mathematics and science programme at the UCT, requested additional professional and personal development training focused on entrepreneurial skills for their future careers. SDU approached the Bertha Centre for this inaugural training, who in turn entrusted Belle and Co. to design and deliver it.
The design thinking approach
Belle and co. used the design thinking framework to structure the three part series. The workshops are designed to guide the learners from problem identification to solution generation, encouraging creative thinking through an entrepreneurial mindset.
The Workshop 1 session included case studies of successful local social enterprises, practical group work on specific design challenges, as well as student presentations. This hands on approach helped learners identify social problems and build confidence in articulating their ideas to the class.
Workshop 1 learning objectives
The first workshop, titled Introduction to Social Entrepreneurship, focused on four core learning objectives:
Learning objective 1: Introducing the concept of social entrepreneurship.
Learning objective 2: Understanding the difference between traditional business models and social enterprises.
Learning objective 3: Encouraging creative thinking to solve social issues through business mechanisms.
Learning objective 4: Developing skills to identify local social problems and opportunities.
Feedback and next steps
At the conclusion of the first session, each student wrote a feedback letter and placed it in a dedicated post box. The facilitation team will use these reflections to assess the session and make adjustments for the upcoming workshops in the series.
From May – October 2024, Belle and Co. worked with the dedicated team at Allan Gray Orbis Foundation to co-create their high school scholarship and university fellowship curriculum. Belle and Co’s director, Ms Rodrigues served as curriculum advisor and leadership expert working with design thinking experts and learning designers to ensure alignment with Allan Gray’s 14 behavioural entrepreneurial competencies.
The Allan Gray Orbis Foundation invests in the education and development of individuals with entrepreneurial potential within Southern Africa. We believe that it takes one responsible, high-impact entrepreneur to change the reality of a city, or even a country, by creating long-term, meaningful job opportunities.
Above images:
Image 1: University Fellowship Advertisement
Image 2 & 3: High School Scholarship Advertisement
Earlier this year, the SIKKA Team approached Belle and Co. to support the team’s creative and sustainability endeavours.
The needs:
The focus on creativity was important, as all of the team are dispersed and displaced after the war, making it hard to find the creative motivation needed for a project of this nature.
In addition, the seed funding which was initially invested by Goethe Institut is coming to an end, and the project needs to develop its own funding streams.
The programme solution:
Over the August and September months, Belle and Co designed and delivered an intensive 8 week blended online course covering various topics related to creativity and business development. We used Zoom for our synchronous sessions, and Google Classrooms for our virtual learning environment, where all resources and recordings could be accessed asynchronously.
The initial 3 sessions focused on creativity including understanding the SIKKA Story, underlying motivations of the members of the team, building new ideas into the platform as well as future-casting the SIKKA business in 10 years time. A number of creative tag lines were invented to capture the essence of the SIKKA story, including:
Art spoke truth, SIKKA captured their legacy
SIkka, a portal to the hearts of its Sudanese people
Sikka is the “living archive” of a revolutionary people
The potential move from a project to an organisational structure then warranted a business plan or actionable roadmap. The five (5) last sessions worked methodically through each section of a business plan from an executive summary to the financial plan:
After learning about the contents of a business plan, the SIKKA team then had to build each section in turn and present their plans in the subsequent sessions until they had built a final business plan with financial forecasting.
As a way to prepare the team for external audiences, Belle and Co. invited key industry stakeholders (Professional Rwandese Performer, a Sudanese Musician, a Congolese University Professor on Cultural Management) to an online pitch session, in order to give the team a real world feel for presenting the SIKKA platform and its story. The audience was able to feedback in real time, so the team could go back and refine their pitch for future funders.
Belle and Co and the SIKKA team continue engaging online, and regularly update each other on the WhatsApp Group to inspire and motivate each other further.
The Participedia School on Transnational Democratic Innovations was hosted simultaneously at the University of the Western Cape [South Africa] and Memorial University, Newfoundland and Labrador [Canada] over 5 days from 10-15 June 2024
The School saw over 85 practitioners and students from 29 countries, supported by 18 facilitators, across two campus (South Africa and Canada), working on transnational democratic challenges to merge policy and practice. (And most of all cross pollination of experience and learning!)
Belisa Rodrigues, under contract with Innovation for Policy Foundation, helped facilitate a workshop session for delegates on participatory policy design methodologies.
Facilitator, Belisa Rodrigues of Belle and Co. Source: SBF
