Jill Ritchie

Jill Ritchie started her own business at the age of 18 while also studying.

By 28, she had created jobs for 120 people in a factory with seven retail outlets. However, she was spending more time doing voluntary work than anything else. She then entered the NGO sector as a member of the start up team of the successful Cape Town based job creation organisation, the Triple Trust, where she initially trained trainers and ran the organisation’s marketing arm. After a year, she took over the fundraising (with no experience in raising money) and, in five years, took the Triple Trust from a budget of R100 000 pa to R9 million. She then spent five years learning about and raising sponsorship for the performing arts and then started her own fundraising consultancy and book publishing business, which she has run for over two decades, employing a team of 14 with offices in the UK and Cape Town. She has edited five books and written 27.

She raised the first ever donation from the UK Lottery (now Big Lottery) for South Africa (500,000) for St John Ambulance in 1996 and undertook St John’s national fundraising in South Africa for 15 years.

Jill co-managed two multi-million rand capital campaigns simultaneously for the University of Johannesburg: new buildings for its Faculty of Arts Design and Architecture and Hotel School.

She has also run capital campaigns for the University of Venda for an arts facility as well as substantial expansion and upgrading of sports facilities. She has just completed four years as Rhodes University’s UK representative, having achieved the goal of funding a new scholarship, assisting in setting up a bequest society and arranging a number of fundraising events in London.

She has arranged numerous successful events for South African charities, raising both funds and friends for the organisations in the process. All funds raised by Jill and her team in the UK are for southern and South African charities and universities. She has declined all offers of work for non-profits in developed countries ? her heart, passion and commitment are for southern or South Africa and the struggle that seamlessly replaced the struggle against apartheid with the struggle against poverty.

Jill serves on the Council of Tshwane University of Technology (TUT). She has pledged her honorarium for this to TUT’s bursary fund for talented but impoverished students. She guest lectures twice a year at the Stellenbosch University Business School’s Non-profit Leadership Programme.

Jill has raised over R2 billion for South African non-profit organisations and has never ‘creamed off? any commission.’

She is currently actively involved in mentoring a number of senior people from key organisations in Zimbabwe, all focused on the financial turnaround of that country.

Despite her world of work having been the not-for-profit sector for over thirty years, she has never let up on her voluntary commitments. She was active in humanitarian aspects of the anti-apartheid movement (caring for family members of Robben Island prisoners.) Together with the late Father Basil van Rensburg, in the 1980s and early 1990s, Jill drove initiatives to enable South Africans “black and white” to meet “not as master and servant/employer and employee” but as people, as South Africans “to overcome fear and mistrust” to change hearts and minds” in preparation on the ground “for the end of the evil of apartheid.”

She has served as a voluntary trustee on many boards over the years. She has been a trustee of the UK Fund for Charities www.ukfundforcharities.org for seven years and its chair for the past five . At the request of the former South African High Commissioner, Dr Zola Skewiyiya, Jill formed the SA-UK Trust Network www.sa-uktrusts.org.za

She has dedicated many hours to this initiative since its inception, funding much of its early costs herself and has achieved her stated goal at its launch; “to nurture and hold the Network together, no matter what”. She was warned at the time of its formation that a number of similar initiatives have fizzled out over the years and she committed to ensuring that this UK based network of over 150 entities working for the greater good of their South African sister organisations, would thrive and flourish. Today, the SA-UK Trust Network is a registered UK trust (with Jill having raised the money to enable this to happen, she holds regular events for its members, is recognised and encouraged by the SA High Commission in London and raises awareness of the needs of the poor and suffering in South Africa (when the focus of the world has long moved to other parts). She is currently leading an initiative to expand the reach and support of the SA-UK Trust Network to include UK based organisations supporting their counterparts throughout the SADC region.

Jill is a born entrepreneur! never having had a job but rather having created hundreds of jobs over the decades. Vitally, she brings refreshing entrepreneurial thinking to her paid and voluntary work for the non-profit sector. She is an “ideas” person, regularly overwhelming her team with innovative concepts which they are required to assist in implementing. She was in fact a social entrepreneur before the term was coined. Her philosophy in her career has always been: “doing business while doing good.”

Jill has run many successful fundraising and marketing campaigns over the years – some paid, some voluntary and others at substantially discounted rates:

• Managing trustee of Western Cape Emergency Relief Trust (caring for victims of urban terror in Cape Town during the 1990s) five years voluntarily.

• Ran the July 2000 fundraising campaign to save 40000 penguins when the ship, The Treasure, ran aground off Cape Town, spilling oil (full target raised; biggest animal rescue project in history; donated a 75% discount fee.

• Worked with Planet Hollywood Restaurant on the opening night of its first venue in Africa; net profit for charity client of over R1 million from the night.

• Worked with/assisted/advised over 300 southern and South African organisations, faith based bodies, schools, sports initiatives and tertiary institutions.

• Conceptualised a funding stream for Childline South Africa, which, fifteen years later, is still bringing in millions.

• Conceptualised the Mayor of Cape Town’s 2013 Mandela Day initiative in which the mayor, Bryan Habanna and the Stormers Rugby team led a food parcel packing initiative for FoodBank SA, resulting in thousands of grocery parcels for organisations feeding the poorest of the poor.

• Just completed a contract to conceptualise, plan and guide the funding of the first Ronald McDonald House in Africa; on the top floor of the new Nelson Mandela Hospital in Johannesburg.

Each year Jill sets a pro bono budget for free consulting time, publications, free places on training courses and no charge for Papillon’s varied services to the sector. Each year this is exceeded by well over 500%.

Jill and her UK and South African teams offer a unique foreign fundraising service to southern and South African organisations. This enables them to cost effectively maximise support for the not-for-profit sector in South Africa from within the UK and globally.

Jill has been made a Fellow of the Southern Africa Institute of Fundraising “for three decades of dedicated service and the development of training publications for the sector throughout the SADC region.”

Jill is a Member of the Venerable Order of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem – inducted into the Order in response to her “above and beyond the call of duty service in raising funds for its voluntary first aid support for people in the terminal stages of Aids related illnesses in the early days of the pandemic.”

She has been a member of Toastmasters International for 25 years and has attained the level of Advanced Toastmaster Gold. She focuses her public speaking on motivating people to support non-profit initiatives.

Jill chaired the National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO) Western Cape, which was absorbed into the Business Women’s Association (BWA), and is a past committee member of the Cape Town branch.

Recognising the critical importance of giving opportunities to young people, she has hired in her Cape Town office, a young school leaver (with no work experience or tertiary training) from an impoverished informal settlement – not as an intern but rather as a fully fledged permanent staff member. Jill and her team are committed to fast tracking the mentoring of their new recruit into the world of work.

In response to the threat of “ageism” preventing experienced older people from finding employment, she actively seeks retired and semi-retired people to work as associates under the banner of her consulting company, thus providing them with an income, an interest and, vitally, ensuring that the non-profit sector benefits from their decades of experience.

Jill turns 60 this year and, as she “has enough stuff”, she has committed to raising enough money from family, friends and colleagues globally, to have the dynamic organisation, Book Dash www.bookdash.org create and provide 5000 books to South African and Zimbabwean children.

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Barry Blomkamp Nd. Bsc (UL) Professional Public Speaker, Trainer and Corporate Entertainer, Motivational speaker, Guest & Key note speaker, Seminar & Conference speaker, Team Builder, Comedian, Master of Ceremonies,

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