Vision Quest Africa aims to make a meaningful contribution to a happier, healthier, more productive and just world through organizational development facilitation, leadership and management formation programs, mentoring support to individuals and organizations, and health and fitness guidance.
Vision Quest Africa
Vision Quest Africa (VQA) is a consulting agency, established in 1995, based in Muizenberg, Cape Town, South Africa. It is an accredited member of the Desmond Tutu Leadership Academy. Vision Quest Africa has to date offered many highly successful programs in South Africa, Lesotho, Tanzania, Uganda, and Cambodia. Participants from more than 20 different countries have attended Vision Quest Africa programs hosted in South Africa.
Two consultants, Garth Viljoen and Dirk Marais form the core team. They subcontract other professionals in their field when necessary.
Personal background Of the two VQA consultants
Dirk Marais has more than 20 years of leadership experience with organizations and has worked as an organization development (OD) consultant for the last ten years. His training background and experience are in management, theology, counselling, individual capacity building, community development, administration and OD. As an International Fellow of the WK Kellogg Foundation, he studied organization development in the USA, completing the National Training Laboratories (NTL) OD Track certificate. He is co-author of Action learning for development: Use your experience to improve your effectiveness (Cape Town: Juta, 1997) with James Taylor and Allan Kaplan.
Garth Viljoen’s specific field of expertise is in health, fitness and nutrition and how this relates to productivity in organizations. He has more than eight years of experience, not only as a professional coach and trainer, but also as an athlete. Within his field he studied administration and marketing and, through Reebok, became a fitness professional. More recently he has added leadership, community development and organization development to his work competency. Garth believes that health and nutrition have much more to do with productivity than we are willing to admit and that we should include it as a more holistic approach to organization development.
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The Desmond Tutu Leadership Academy:
The Desmond Tutu Peace Trust was founded in 1998 by Archbishop Desmond and Mrs Leah Tutu to research and establish a non-denominational Peace Centre to respond to the opportunities and challenges of social transformation in South Africa. The value of the Desmond Tutu Peace Centre [ www.tutu.org (http://www.tutu.org) ] is not in being a memorial to one of South Africa’s most famous sons, but in using the example of his unique leadership as a model to empower individuals to apply enlightened leadership practices, approaches and tools so that individuals can personally contribute to the improvement of society. The Desmond Tutu Peace Centre, through its Leadership Academy offers courses in leadership development, self and organizational management and rural capacity building, believing that people in communities are the building blocks of meaningful social transformation. The Peace Centre’s Leadership Academy offers adaptable community-based courses to a wide range of people and groups using a wide range of accredited partners. The specific focus is to nurture and develop visionary leadership (especially, but not only), amongst young people and women so that they are equipped to tackle the challenges facing them presently, and in the future, in a powerful new way..
The Peace Centre works in southern Africa, the rest of Africa and has partner organizations in Jordan, Norway and the USA. The Desmond Tutu chair of leadership studies is based at the University of Dar Es Salaam.
VQA has become an accredited partner of the Desmond Tutu Leadership Academy, and works more specifically as a service provider to the Academy in capacity building programs in leadership and management for individuals and organizations..
Facilitators Garth Viljoen & Dirk Marais
Mentor partners LMD programme
Participants LMD programme
