Why Uluntu Community Foundation

Uluntu was registered in 2008 to provide a people centered mechanism for community development and empowerment in Matabeleland Provinces. The Foundation serves as a convener, a broker and catalyst for community empowerment through training and grant making.

Uluntu Community Foundation seeks to provide tools for the building of resources (financial, technical, material, and intellectual) within and outside communities in the Matabeleland Provinces. the tools will enhance local philanthropy and build leadership as well as entrepreneurship at the community level.

Many Zimbabweans both inside and outside the country are looking for possible ways to overcome the current stark conditions.They know that real change and progress will come from the people themselves employing their skills and ideas. They need an institutional partner that can help translate this vision to reality for the long term and that will be a resource for our communities for years to come.

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What Makes Us Different

The pipe-dream of sustainability . . .

Sustainability is the issue at the heart of most community foundations – and the environmental meaning of the word is as important as its organizational significance,particularly in a country and a continent subject to increasingly unpredictable rainfall and erratic climatic conditions, both of which compound the physical challenges of securing a livelihood from the land. Add to these natural circumstances a set of economic factors that has laid waste whole communities, seen poverty and unemployment reach worrying heights and gross national product nosedive, and sustainability begins to seem something of a pipe-dream. And then top all that with a political state of affairs that has made your country an international pariah, severely reduced any appeal it might have held for international investors, and threatened to damage the social cohesion of communities themselves – and you have a cocktail of difficulties that most people would run away from.
So the fact that the Uluntu Community Foundation, far from doing so, has recently recorded its fifth year of operation (it was registered in 2008) is impressive enough. That it has done so while keeping true to its founding principles and maintaining the same core of volunteer board members is doubly astounding. In this stony ground, Uluntu has laid down roots and caused branches to grow that show every chance of enduring and flourishing.