JLT South Africa (JLT SA), a corporate and specialist insurance, reinsurance and employee benefits broker, celebrated Friday the 15th July 2016 at their Johannesburg head office with a bang.
What sounded like hundreds of feet barrelling up the three storeys of stairs to JLT’s roof top deck on Friday afternoon were actually 40 boys from the Orlando West United Football Club, joining JLT for a braai and to handover the new soccer kit and forty pairs of new soccer boots to the club.
JLT SA began their relationship with the Orlando West United Football Club in December 2015, after meeting Sipho Nyembe, the founder and owner of the non-profit organisation during one of the clubs practice sessions at Orlando West.
At JLT SA, we believe in going beyond the expected for our clients. This value is intrinsic to our culture and is evident in the work that we do. When seeking partners and establishing relationships, we look for organisations that have the same values and culture as we do. After our meeting with Sipho, we were assured that not only do our values match, but that we were faced with an individual who has gone above and beyond for his community, the people in it, and whose goals and dreams we wanted to be a part of.
The Orlando West United Football Club was founded some ten years ago, and is currently operated by Sipho and a small management team. At the time of our meeting, Sipho had been funding and running the club on his own for the last decade, giving his personal time and finances to support the club and the boys who were a part of it.
Currently, the club looks after 40 boys, aged from 12 to 22. The club has also recently acquired some girls and is hoping to increase the number of female members. Though the Orlando West United Football Club is a football organisation and the four teams (U15, U17, U20 and Seniors) regularly play matches in local leagues, the gruelling daily practices are about more than just creating football players, it’s about developing well-rounded, complete human beings.
Sipho’s inspiration comes from his own days as a teenager, and the temptations and dangers he encountered on the streets. It was through football that he learned discipline, self-respect, and the self-confidence to push himself and build a better life. He is now a qualified Professional Accountant and a successful business owner. His vision is to give back to his own community the values that he was taught so many years ago through the sport that helped him – football. As coach and mentor, Sipho instils not only sports skills but important life skills, such as discipline, respect, teamwork, perseverance and self-value, so that the boys that he coaches today can grow up to become respectable citizens and give back to their communities just as he did. When explaining why he began the club Sipho states, “if we can part from here [practice] each day knowing these boys were safe for two hours, then that’s all that matters, I can sleep at night.”
Sipho’s vision of creating a safe space for the boys where they can be away from the temptations on the streets, a space where the boys can grow and develop - this is the vision that JLT SA is proud to be a part of.
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