UPWARD GLOBILITY, a new video series produced by Atlas Network in the USA that explores how people flourish when they are free to make choices that unleash innovation and change, focuses on the Free Market Foundation’s Khaya Lam project in South Africa, whose aim is to help previously dispossessed families acquire title to their homes and land.
The new series, which launched globally on YouTube on June 1, is hosted by Australian adventure traveller Vale Sloane and directed by filmmaker Dugan Bridges. It focuses on stories of Atlas Network partners that are working to create prosperity for all by supporting local opportunities for entrepreneurship, education, and community growth.
“One of the most exciting aspects of UPWARD GLOBILITY is that we’re sharing how Atlas Network’s global partners engage in grassroots action that empower local leaders to build communities that respond to unique, local needs,” said Melissa Mann, Vice President of Communications for Atlas Network.
“Ultimately,UPWARD GLOBILITY is all about great stories that show that dignity, respect, and opportunity are the tools that create a freer, more prosperous and more peaceful world for everyone.”
With each episode of UPWARD GLOBILITY focusing on a different community in a particular region of the world, the first episode, “Upward Globility South Africa: Whose Land Is It Anyway?” has Sloane travelling to South Africa to learn about the Free Market Foundation’s (FMF) Khaya Lam project.
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Since its inception, the FMF has been fighting for property rights for all South Africans. Through their Khaya Lam land reform project, which is supported by donations and sponsorships, large and small, the FMF can achieve the kind of transformational work for which millions of South Africans have been yearning for generations.
In South Africa, the legacy of apartheid has left millions of families without the legal rights to the land they live on.
“Protection of property is sacrosanct and at the core of individual liberty and freedom,” says Temba Nolutshungu, the director of Free Market Foundation. Khaya Lam, which means “my home” in Xhosa, aspires to help more than 20 million South Africans make home ownership a reality by securing fully-tradable freehold titles to the properties they currently occupy.
Nolutshungu points out that property deprivation has not ended post-apartheid, but that it continues on a massive scale for public purposes and affects black South Africans almost exclusively. “The dream of owning your own home is out of reach for many people,” says Sloane, who met with new landowners near Mokwallo to hear their stories and tour homes that they can now call their own.
“Property ownership brings dignity and financial security to people who’ve never had it before—and Free Market Foundation is helping to make that possible.”
Sloane travels to Tennessee in the series’ second episode, where he meets with recently incarcerated women to discuss how a local non-profit is helping them reintegrate into society.
Upward Globility South Africa: Whose land is it anyway? is available on YouTube:https://youtu.be/VsTVUGhdG7M
About Atlas Network
Atlas Network is a United States-based educational charity that increases global prosperity by strengthening a global network of independent partner organizations that promote individual freedom and are committed to identifying and removing barriers to human flourishing. The organization’s vision is of a free, prosperous, and peaceful world where the principles of individual liberty, property rights, limited government, and free markets are secured by the rule of law. The network currently serves more than 500 organizations in 98 countries. For more information, visit AtlasNetwork.org.
About Free Market Foundation
The Free Market Foundation (Southern Africa) is an independent public benefit organization founded in 1975 to promote and foster an open society, the rule of law, personal liberty, and economic and press freedom as fundamental components of its advocacy of human rights and democracy based on classical liberal principles.
Dugan Bridges Biography
Bridges is an award-winning filmmaker whose work has been distributed by Amazon and TimeWarner and has been featured in The New York Times, USA Today, and MovieMaker magazine. “UPWARD GLOBILITY is particularly exciting because it transcends politics in a way that is rare,” he said. “We’re exploring ideas that show how human ingenuity and initiative can change lives for the better.”