Mobile Counselling Launch

Today was one of those days where we will be taking the Advice Support service to another level in collaboration with 4 other Non-profit organisations and supported by Department of Social Development. The Substance Abuse Mobile Counselling pilot project will investigate the use of cellphones as a counselling and support medium for people who are impacted by substance abuse.

All the NGOs came together today for the oficial launch of the mobile counselling pilot and having a group of people working together, coming from different backgrounds was amazing to experience as the dream and vision for establishing many of these Reconstructed Living Lab spaces across South Africa are moving towards becoming a reality. Although all the mobile counsellors from the various organisations came together for the launch at the Impact Centre, the group will be working remotely with the support hub being at the birth place of Advice Support Network at IDM's Impact Centre.


With all the excitement in the air and representatives from different organisations coming together through the purpose of using cellphones for social change seeing the impact the session of the launch had on those in need of support was incredible. During the first two hour session of the pilot, 103 subscribers made contact with us and 2034 messages were sent to people in need of support in the area of drug addiction.

The best part of this good start is that it is only the beginning as we will see more lives be reconstructed through people and the use of technology.

Debt Breaker on Angel

With the increase number of people looking for assistance on how to get out of debt and the number of MXit subscribers increasing we've added our Debt Breaker service to our MXit Angel Portal.

This service will give consumers an opportunity to add our MXit contact and they will be able to access FREE information about debt and debt counselling over their mobile phone.

MXit is a Mobile Instant Messenger that is available for most handsets and PCs. MXit Lifestyle also launched an application for the iPhone. It can be downloaded here

You can add our Angel service on your MXit application as follows
- Go to Menu
- Contacts
- Add Contacts
- MXit Services
- Add the following (Service Name: Angel, Nickname: Angel)
- Accept Contact

For more information about our Debt Breaker Service you can go here

Angels and Mobiles

Thanks to Nick Booth for recording this quick video displaying our MXit Angel project.

Angel service for Drug Addicts in South Africa from Podnosh on Vimeo.

Read his post about the Reconstructed project here

Athlone Living Lab: Community Innovation Space

The Athlone Living Lab Space are being upgraded and will be ready by next week. The space will be used for the Advice Support Services, training and development space for social and services innovation. Thanks to the Reconstructed Team for all the hard work in getting the space ready.

Angel on MXit success story

After a long week of new developments and seeing what other technologies are available to be used for community empowerment, I got an add on FaceBook as a friend with a message that really made my evening (See picture above).

Message reads:
Hey the angel thing on mxit helpd my friend get out of an abusive relationship.just wanted to say thanx!

The Angel service on MXit is a first of its kind launched last year in conjunction with MXit Lifestyle PTY Ltd. This service provide its users free information on MXit relating to Substance Abuse, HIV/AIDS, Depression, Abuse and Stress and Coping. After hearing how this service has helped someone from an abusive relationship makes this work just so much more special for us, knowing that we are empowering individuals and reconstructing lives.

A Year of Reconstruction

Today as we end our year of Reconstruction a new journey lies ahead as we continue the use of technology to empower communities. Having completed part of this exciting journey it is also an opportunity to reflect on how this journey has changed my life and the lives of many others.

How can I ever forget the first day 23 February 2008 when we gathered at CPUT for the first time and the room was full of uncertainty not knowing how long we'll be running this course or what to expect. This year went beyond our wildest dreams and I believe it is the beginning of great things ahead. This year has had its ups and downs, as we unfortunately had 2 of our members not completing the year with us. But that was never going to make our Reconstructed team despondent. They were still persevering under the pressures and decided to complete this year. Not only did we empower the Reconstructed Team but we also launched Mom 2.0 (mothers in the community being empowered with the use of technology). We've had so much fun while learning.We've also had the privilege of meeting great individuals who shared their knowledge with us this year. Special thanks to Rafiq, Ramon, Johan, Gerhard, Nils, Micke and Pam who really empowered the Reconstructed team.

We also presented at the ZA WWW 2008 conference (won best poster of the conference award), Highway Africa Conference, Huddlemind's Nomadic Dinner, 27Dinner in Cape Town and Port Elizabeth just but to name but a few. Another highlight was when we had the opportunity to be live on SABC2's Morning Live on 24th October 2008. This was such a wonderful experience for many of the team as we believe that all our hard work was finally being acknowledged. Not only did we get some attention from the media but we also had the honour of gathering with peers in the Social Media industry.

Seeing how lives were transformed through the use of technology was encouraging. When we started the Drug Advice and Support (DAS) we never expected that it would have such an impact on a nation. Since its inception we've already had more than 50,000 messages, almost 11,000 conversations and closing in on 5000 contacts to date. This in itself was incredible as we began offering advice and support for hundreds of young people on their mobile phones, Tuesdays and Thursdays between 3 and 5pm. The Reconstructed blog also continued to grow as the team increased their contributions with the goal of reaching 1000 blog posts by the end of 2008 (The good news is that they've achieved this goal read all about it here).

The technologies we've used this year and that proved to be useful in the Social Media for Social Change (SMSC) course were:
- Blogging (Using blogger)
- Social Networking (FaceBook and Ning)
- Micro-blogging (Twitter and Spoink)
- Instant Messageging (Google Chat, MXit, The Grid)
- Web Literacy
- VOIP (Skype and Fring)
- PodCasting



The climax of the year was when we had The Reconstruction graduation 12 December 2008 at Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT). Seeing all the excited graduates and proud parents, family was such a wonderful moment for me personally. We also launched our Podcasts and Angel project at the graduation which was just a cherry on the top.

Well with 2008 almost coming to an end we are looking forward to 2009 and we would like to thank everyone who has contributed and shown interest in the Reconstructed project. We will continue on this journey as we empower communities in tension using technology.

We would like to wish you and your families a wonderful and blessed New Year for 2009.

Help with social problems on MXit

Yesterday Angel was in the news again after being launched a week ago. An article by Yolandé Hayward from The Weekend Post in Port Elizabeh "Help with Social Problems in MXit":

AFTER successfully using MXit to counsel youngsters with drug abuse problems, a young entrepreneur is now using this networking tool to equip them with knowledge on various social issues...read more

Angel on MXit to support HIV/AIDS in South Africa

With the increase of AIDS deaths in South Africa, as part of the Angel project we decided to make relevant information available to users on MXit.

"South Africa is currently experiencing one of the most severe AIDS epidemics in the world. At the end of 2007, there were approximately 5.7 million people living with HIV in South Africa, and almost 1,000 AIDS deaths occurring every day."...

With technology in our hands we are able to empower those who are affected by HIV/AIDS and see how we can bring about the reconstruction of our nation through education on every possible platform. We hope with information and contact details at their fingertips on Angel (we will expand this over the next few weeks) that this will be a step in the right direction in educating our youth.

How to access Angel on MXit:

- Go to Menu
- Contacts
- Add Contacts
- MXit Services
- Add the following (Service Name: Angel, Nickname: Angel)
- Accept Contact

Find your Angel on MXit

Last Friday, 12 December 2008, at the graduation of The Reconstructed we launched a new 24hour service "Angel". The Angel project on MXit was birthed out of the need that many of our young people need to be informed about the dangers of substance abuse on a platform that they will be able to interact with. Angel is a collaboration between CPUT, MXit and Impact Direct that provides MXit users with information concerning: substance abuse, HIV/Aids, Abuse, depression, stress and coping.

Each of these topics are then further explored. For example Substance Abuse have topics such as "What is Substance Abuse?, What is Addiction?, Type of Substances, Stages of drug dependency, Signs of Drug Use and categories of drugs. Under the Type of substances Angel gives more details about the most common drugs and this will be updated on a regular basis. Each of these substances are then further broken down. Each drug will be described and discussed (Street names, how it is used, characteristics, short term effects, long term effects and withdrawal symptoms).

Other than just giving more information about the various topics Angel also provide a "Find your Angel" service which gives users of Angel contact numbers to various services in the different provinces. We realised that many people don't know where to go to for help when facing certain social issues and we're trying to help people especially our youth with the info in a way that they are comfortable with.

Angel is an additional service to DAS (Drug Advice Support which only runs Tue and Thu 3-5pm) and runs 24/7 and no cost involved to subscribe to the service. We are excited to see how Angel will be used to change lives accross our nation.

How to access Angel on MXit:

- Go to Menu
- Contacts
- Add Contacts
- MXit Services
- Add the following (Service Name: Angel, Nickname: Angel)
- Accept Contact

MXit Angel Project

After weeks of working on the Angel Project today we finally started with the testing of this service. This service will be launched soon and will offer people the opportunity to have access to help 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. Will keep you updated as we will be launching this soon.