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Youth Month Stories-Tebogo Mabye

Constitution Hill: Tebogo Mabye

Tebogo Mabye

My name is Tebza, aka Tebogo Mabye and I am 24years old. I grew up in Hillbrow and I am very passionate about my city and my community. I grew up as a weirdo, I was that light skinned kid with freckles, taller than most of his peers and just interested in weird sports like karate and basketball. I grew up in a relatively poor family raised by a single parent mother, who struggled to make ends meet. This experience has encouraged me to be an over achiever and to excel in everything that I did. I was selected as the SA youth Hero of October in 2013 for a campaign I did with Umuzi about teenage pregnancy, which was an issue facing my community- I have also  been an SA kickboxing Champ in my category for 3 years in a row and have then moved to opening my own coffee shop called Hillbrewed Coffee Co. that pays homage to Hillbrow my hood, which is my biggest and proudest achievement so far.

The coffee shop has been a long term dream of mine since the first time I drank my first cup of real coffee when I was 15 and I have loved the idea of having my own coffee shop from then. I am very passionate about working with kids and the youth in my community and have done a few projects with MES (Mould Empower Serve) an organization that works in Hillbrow and has a vision to change the heart of the city. The role that I see myself playing is being a role model to the kids and teens, showing them that it is possible to come out of a broken society and community and make something of yourself. I am currently working as a project coordinator at a homeless community at MES and hoping to start a barista training academy here to train some of the residents that stay here as well as the youth that we work with. 

I am also a junior consultant at a strategy and communication agency (Stone consulting), A third year Strategic Brand communication student at Vega and a part-time model. My wish and hope for the youth of South Africa is for us to become better in everything that we do, for us to do and be more, to dream more and to change more lives in the process and to never stop sharing our stories. #Hillbrewed 

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