our team

Yasmin Sooka is the former Executive Director of the Foundation for Human Rights in South Africa. A leading human rights lawyer, activist and international expert in Transitional Justice, gender, international war crimes and sexual violence. Yasmin was appointed to the UN Secretary General’s three-member Independent Review Panel on UN Response to Allegations of Sexual Abuse by Foreign Military Forces in Central African Republic. She served as a member of the Advisory Panel on the review of UN Resolution 1325 and was the Inaugural George Soros Visiting Chair at the School for Public Policy at Central European University in Budapest in 2015.

Yvonne Mokgoro is a former justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. She was appointed to the bench in 1994 by Nelson Mandela. Mokgoro served as chairperson of the South African Law Reform Commission until 2012 and is an honorary professor at a number of universities in South Africa and a former board member of the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria. She chairs the board of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund and is a member of the Mandela Rhodes Foundation. Mokgoro also serves on the expert panel that appoints members to the board of the Reserve Bank of South Africa.

Alice Brown is the head of Sojourner, Tubman, Wells & Co. Consulting. Trained as an attorney and with extensive experience in social justice philanthropy and civil rights litigation and advocacy, Ms Brown is committed to the use of the law for the public good. Currently, she advises, speaks and writes on a broad range of topics including philanthropic giving, non-profit organization governance, leadership development, organizational effectiveness, public interest law and transformation within the South African legal profession.

In addition to acting as an Independent Expert and CFC member, she currently serves as the Chair of the board of Section27 and a trustee of the Nelson Mandela Foundation. Ms Brown is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Institute of Directors in Southern Africa. Her professional experience includes nearly 20 years of leadership at the Ford Foundation as a human rights program officer in its New York headquarters and as a program officer, Deputy Representative and then as the Foundation’s Representative for the Office for Southern Africa based in Johannesburg.

Richard is a paralegal and activist, providing general advice to Orange Farm and the surrounding community. He is also mediator, counsellor, facilitating workshops, seminars, and promoting access to justice through taking part in the programmes of community radio stations. He is also a chairperson of the Association of Gauteng Advice Office and he serve on the National council of the Association of Community Advice Offices SA.

“Bricks” is also active in the social movements to protect the social justice issues in the community main issues that we are dealing with are cases such as housing & eviction, labour issues, land claim, domestic violence, racism and xenophobia. His paralegal work mainly focused on disadvantaged and vulnerable group within the community. He works hard making people aware of their human and legal rights. “People need advice on their constitutional rights and they have real problems relating to housing, water, sanitation, access to identity and other documents, like birth certificates.

Aubrey Matshiqi is a research fellow at the Helen Suzman Foundation. He has specialised in South African Politics focusing on the ANC and the Alliance, the re-alignment of opposition politics, electoral system reform and the state of democracy in South Africa. As a research fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies, Matshiqi did research on historical and collective memory in post-apartheid South Africa.

Nazmeera is the Chief Sustainability Officer at Ninety One. In this role, she oversees firm-wide sustainability initiatives, including their commercial imperatives, investment integration, and their inhabit and advocacy work. Prior to this she was Head of SA Investments, where she worked across Ninety One’s public and private strategies in Africa. Nazmeera has covered the macro-economy in South Africa and other emerging markets since 2000. She is passionate about making financial markets work to support development. Her remit has included the Emerging Africa Infrastructure Fund, which provides debt financing for infrastructure projects across Africa.

Mpho Moloisi holds a Master’s Degree in Public Administration from the University of Pretoria. She is a human rights activist and a leading expert in grant-making in the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Her career in grant-making spans over 19 years, both as a full-time employee and as a consultant. In those years, her achievements include the 2011-2012 edition of the Stanford Who’s Who (USA) Black Book - an inclusion which is limited to individuals who have demonstrated outstanding leadership in their occupation, industry and profession. During her time at the National Lottery Commission (NLC), she was part of the task team that introduced the Grant-Making Process Re-Engineering Project, which was a smart digital platform that ensured efficient output of grant applications and processing. She then moved to the Media Development and Diversity Agency (MDDA), where she introduced the Accelerated Grant Disbursement Strategy to improve efficiency in grant making in the community media sector.