This Fleeting Lifetime...

Being in "the industry" was not a dream Nadine nurtured as a child... for there were no people of color on the screens until after she had entered university. So, in many ways the journey seems surreal, looking in from outside. 

One of the most dynamic experiences on this journey has been to experience the power of media to bridge the human divide. First seeing the materialisation of a vision of reigniting the volunteer culture in SA with a volunteer-match portal. And then to serve as co-host of the LIVE multi faith and multi-cultural breakfast show Spirit Sundae from 2003-2008. The common ground was a special feature called Spirit In Action  , which she Directed/Produced to share the heart-warming and larger than life stories of unsung change-makers who had served tirelessly on the frontline during Apartheid and continued to serve after Freedom. This feature led to an interactive call to action to viewers to put their spirit into action as volunteers alongside these  "Visionaries In Africa" or at other service sites across Africa. The program being renewed for 7 seasons was a testament to its social impact off-screen.

The Turning Point:

Growing up in Apartheid South Africa, television was censored by the Government, and being a media professional was not an aspiration that she had nurtured nor considered for she, like many of those in her generation dreamed of being in the helping/healing professions, hoping to rise beyond the limitations of the generation before, for whom access to education was a challenge. Places for Black (meaning African, Indian and Colored) students in medical school and health sciences were based on a quota system preventing qualified Indian students from gaining entry into predominantly White universities. And those who may have been qualified to enter, like Nadine's father, simply didn't have the financial means to fund their medical studies and had to choose other professions like Teaching.   

Nadine was inspired to change mid-degree from Health Science to Communications Science when Nelson Mandela, in the country's first democratic elections, was hailed as President of South Africa in 1994. In that surreal and euphoric moment in history, she had a vision of leading student volunteers from her campus alongside corporate volunteers from the grocery store she worked part-time at, to serve in the surrounding townships - an initiative that had never been attempted in all the history of Rhodes University until that moment. 

The experience was life-changing: coming face to face in townships she had never been able to enter before and finding a community filled with the familiar joys and challenges of her own Indian township gave rise to a voice that chanted in her head "I wish I could show my people the humanity I am seeing here in this Black, Colored and even White township". Added to this new found human-connection, she experienced the power of media to bridge the human divide, when she  convinced the local town newspaper to give her a full-spread page each week for 6 weeks, to document the experiences of these student and employee volunteers serving alongside unsung heroes many of whom were receiving "Mandela Awards" for their service on the frontline while Mandela served in prison for 27years. 

Against this backdrop of experiencing freedom from prejudice for the very first time, Nadine experienced fear and humiliation as a female student in that university town, when confronted by degrading images from pornographic media that suddenly flooded the check-out aisles of the grocery stores and the windows of Mom and Pop corner-shops. This led to her mobilizing female students on campus to come together to share their collective experiences and to take action. This led to the largest  grocery store refraining from selling the pornographic magazines out of due regard for the large female student population that supported the store. Whilst other stores moved their magazines so that they were out of the eyeline of children. Sadly, back home in Chatsworth, on her college break, she learnt from her baby brother who was only in Grade 1, that this harmful content had already infiltrated the safe zones of homes and schools. This created an urgency to further respond to protect children and with her baby brother alongside, Nadine's first public advocacy was to tour schools and libraries as a volunteer delivering a child-safety message through a theatre-in-education (TIE) production using puppets, masks and well-known stories.

This dual experience of media's power to build/destroy democracy and dignity in South Africa, was the tipping point for her leap from the medical to the media field. 

Nadine entered the post-Apartheid media industry determined to use media as a kind of "medicine" by contributing to media that would allow audiences to experience empathy and unity across racial, cultural and socio-economic divides, and in so doing, to help the individual viewer to heal from the internal causes of ill-health which South Africans were gripped by during the transition:  prejudice, fear, sense of inferiority/superiority, rage and even hatred which had divided the peoples of South Africa under Apartheid. Most of all, Nadine had a vision of participating in media that would allow viewers to appreciate the dignity, compassion and intellect of women, to counter the degrading metaphors that pornography perpetuated by objectifying women.

She has remained committed to using media as a force to mobilize audiences into action as change-makers, and to eradicate the exploitation of women and Children both on and off-screen. 

Divine interventions to actualize the Vision:

While in her first production serving as trainee Producer on the Japan-prize winning Children's educational series The Molo Show produced by Times Media TV in 1999 for SABC, Nadine championed the inclusion of children with special needs to be allowed to audition as Presenters. She successfully co-ordinated a casting call and two school-children with physical challenges were selected to co-host the series which went on to win the Japan prize for children's programming. 

Next she experienced the profound social impact of Drama to deepen democracy in South Africa:

In 2000 she was selected to work as a writer on the launch of Sesame Street in South Africa, Takalani Sesami  and contributed original Radio Drama and Music. In 2001, she served on the core writing team to create the youth drama series Backstage a daily drama based on the US-hit series Fame. From 2003 to 2005, Nadine was cast to play the significant character of Gita on daily drama Isidingo, historical for being the first character of Indian origin on the series. This allowed millions of South Africans explore the culture, values and faith of South African Indians. In Homecoming she played Jyothi, portraying the spouse of an African activist returning from exile to South Africa after democracy. She played Kasturba Gandhi in a Swedish docu-drama co-production highlighting Gandhi's 21 years (1893-1914) in South Africa. The film made explored the role Gandhi's wife and other women activists played during this time as Gandhi evolved his practices and philosophies most notably Satyagraha - passive resistance. The ANC which was launched in 1913, the year before Gandhi departed for Indian, based its resistance on the practice of Satyagraha until the 1960's when it eventually adopted the armed-struggle. Gandhi's returned to India as the Mahatma who would apply his experiences in South Africa's liberation movement to the eventual liberation of Indian from British rule.  

In 2009 and 2011 Nadine was cast to play Suraya Samuels, in Season 1 and Season 2 of the parliamentary drama 90 Plein Street, commissioned by SABC Education to encourage voter participation in elections. Between 2009 and 2011 Nadine worked on Health Communication Dramas produced by Mindset TV network focusing on HIV testing, counseling and treatment of Youth and Children and distributed across hospitals and clinics, made possible with the support of USAID, Johns Hopkins and PEPFAR, 

While fulfilling her vision of creating  broadcast media for social impact, more possibilities began to unfold for using new media and technology to connect audiences with the heroes they saw on-screen. And in 2000 Nadine found herself 'giving birth' to an initiative called Visionaries In Africa, the first ever African portal to match volunteers to volunteer-hosting non-profits. The site was selected by the United Nations Volunteers and Nadine was invited as Webmaster to engage with other webmasters and voluntarism leaders from around the world. She presented this African innovation at the general assembly of the United Nations Volunteers International Symposium in Geneva in 2001, the culmination of the UN International Year of the Volunteer (IYV 2001).

In 2002 she was selected as one of ten South African youth leaders to travel to the United States to engage with other Citizen Service leaders, to visit Harvard and MIT and receive a cash stipend during the program. Instead she followed another vision to remain in South Africa to give Youth and Children a voice during the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) which was to be hosted for the first time in 10 years, and in South Africa. She was able to eventually convene 30000 students, the largest gathering of youth and children at the Visionaries In Africa Letsema campaign - a celebration of Volunteer Spirit, an official parallel event of WSSD at the Orlando Stadium, Soweto. This was a partnership with the Department of Education across 800 Johannesburg schools. This gathering created a platform for international students who were visiting the Soweto Mountain of Hope (SOMOHO) led by Ashoka Fellow Mandla Mentoor, to share the goals they deemed most critical as they had presented to Gen Koffi Annan in Soweto.

Building on the momentum of the WSSD gathering, Nadine approached Media24 who agreed to provided corporate support to host the VIA operation out of its  Auckland Park office in the media capital of Joburg. In 2003 Nadine was nominated for an Ashoka Fellowship and in 2003 she was officially elected into the network alongside other social activists in South Africa.

In early 2003, Nadine was cast to serve as On-Camera Host and a Content Director/Producer of Spirit Sundae, which was to be an experimental 13-part series commissioned by the SABC to bridge cultural and faith divides. The show aired across the African continent for the first two years on SABC Africa and the series continued to be renewed until 2008. 

The social impact of Nadine's volunteer feature Spirit In Action was to popularize the culture of volunteering and the increase the media coverage of non-profits and the citizen service of public personalities across programming on all channels.

In 2006 Nadine's initial experience of pornography's harm came full circle after 11 years in media, when the same  visionaries whose work she was documenting, began to share similar stories across the country of the negative impact of pornography on their beneficiaries - especially children and youth. 

This led to Nadine taking a public stance as a media professional to lead a national campaign supporting legislation to enforce greater child protection from media exploitation. 

This activism led to Nadine joining forces with Africa's foremost expert on child pornography, Advocate Iyavar Chetty to conduct independent research and advocacy. With support from Ford Foundation South Africa, Nadine was able to take up an invitation from Duke University to serve as Social Entrepreneur in Residence in 2009 conducting a study across the US, UK and Canada to protect children from sexual exploitation. Iyavar Chetty continues to serve as a Trustee of VIA Foundation and VIA USA has been launched with the continued support of Ashoka. 

Nadine's purpose is to create globally distributed media to mobilize global volunteers to serve alongside Visionaries In Africa, addressing the most pressing needs facing the under-resourced non-profit community, and to implement a continent-wide call for volunteer action to disrupt the child sexual abuse "industry".

Adv Chetty created VIA's call to action

"To Save One Child is to Save All Children" emphasizing the role of each and every individual to play a role to protect the children we love.