ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the history of the Joint Enrichment Project (JEP)—a prominent South African youth development non-governmental organization (NGO)—from its origins in 1986 to its closure in 2008. After an introduction to JEP in its prime (the late 1990s), this chapter picks up where Chapter 1 ended: The turmoil of the 1980s anti-apartheid struggle. Over two decades, JEP repositioned itself through five time periods corresponding roughly with the eras of its five main directors: Eric Molobi, Sheila Sisulu, Steve Mokwena (with Penny Foley as deputy director), Neville Naidoo, and Linda Shange. Drawing on archival research, participant-observation, and interviews with former directors and staff conducted between 1998 and 2018, the discourse analysis in this chapter shows how JEP repositioned itself from an anti-apartheid focus, to sector building, to capacity building (organizational and individual), and then to potential partnership with government, with attendant shifts in the process and purpose of learning. The ability to make these shifts secured JEP's existence for over a decade after the first democratic elections in 1994, when many NGOs closed as international-donor funding disappeared. But JEP's repositioning also reconfigured its identity in sometimes-conflicting ways, with a direct impact on the meaning of learning for its staff and youth participants.
