STAND (Social Transformation Action Defined) is a South African women-led nonprofit, a registered Public Benefit Organisation with Section 18A tax-exemption status, and a specialist technical platform working at the intersection of gender-responsive justice, gender-based violence, substance-related harms, public health, and systems accountability.

Founded in 2018 and based in Cape Town, STAND operates as a lean, technically deep organisation, mobilising specialist consultants and collaborators according to programme scope and need. This model keeps STAND agile and responsive while holding the analytical and technical standards of a senior institutional partner.

We are not a generalist development organisation. Our work is intersectional by design, sitting where gender-based violence, substance-related harms, justice and health meet, and we bring the expertise to close the gap between what the evidence shows and what actually gets done.

STAND began in 2018 in Cape Town, emerging from frontline community engagement and a clear-sighted recognition that the systems meant to protect the most vulnerable people were systematically failing them.

Over time, STAND evolved from community-rooted practice into a highly credible implementation and systems-strengthening partner with growing regional and international relevance. Its earlier community-based treatment work was run in research partnership with the South African Medical Research Council. The work deepened. The evidence base expanded. The institutional relationships strengthened.

Today STAND holds a distinctive position: the credibility of a senior technical partner with the agility of a specialist, senior-led organisation. It is led by Stacey Doorly-Jones, a strategist, qualitative researcher, technical writer, and systems adviser whose career has been built at the intersection of gender justice, substance-related harms, and institutional accountability.

Across South Africa and the wider region, the mandates, laws and services to respond to gender-based violence (GBV) largely exist. What breaks is the coordination between them. A report opened with law enforcement stalls before it reaches the prosecutor. A survivor referred for health care is lost before social development ever hears of her. Information degrades as it passes between institutions, so that by the time a case reaches court it is often incomplete or illegible, and is struck from the court roll for want of clarity rather than merit. Each part of the system does its job, and the woman still falls through the spaces in between.

Trace Her Case, Track Her Justice is STAND's response: a privacy-conscious way to follow a case across every institution that touches it, from first report through health, social services, policing and the courts, so that no handover becomes a dead end and the information holds together at each step. It makes the breakdowns visible and strengthens accountability across the whole system, while protecting the survivor's privacy and working within each department's existing mandate.

The design discipline is deliberate. The Red Dot Process adds no parallel database, requires no institution to change its mandate, and shares no identifying client records. It works through the systems that partners already use, and the roles they already hold. That is why it went from design to a live dispatch to law enforcement inside a single programme cycle.

The community layer is equally grounded. STAND equipped and further trained 31 screened GBV ambassadors within the Department of Social Development's existing GBV Ambassador Programme, supported testing and peer-led safety systems, and documented a replicable district model.

Trace Her Case, Track Her Justice is the vision the Red Dot Process proves: a model that any district can adopt to make GBV response visible, coordinated, and accountable, without new systems or new mandates. The pilot is working. The method is documented. The next step is scale.

We are seeking grantmakers, funders, corporate social investment partners and individual supporters to carry this across the Global South, beginning with Phase 2 of the Overstrand rollout and extending into new districts.

You don't have to be an institution to move this. Every individual contribution goes straight into a live system that is already dispatching real cases, and carries it to more women this festive season.

Partner with STAND   Back the scale-up

STAND is a registered South African Non-Profit Company and Public Benefit Organisation, governed by a formal Board of Directors that provides independent oversight, strategic guidance, and fiduciary accountability.

The Board is deliberately constituted to reflect the technical and policy domains in which STAND operates, so that governance is not merely procedural but substantively informed. Members are selected for sector expertise, independence, and their capacity to strengthen STAND's institutional credibility and strategic direction. The Board meets formally once a year, and maintains active, ongoing engagement with STAND's programme strategy, financial governance and organisational development through regular communication between meetings.

STAND's Board is not a formal requirement met on paper. It is a substantive governance body, constituted so that the organisation is independently overseen by people who understand, from their own professional experience, the complexity of the work STAND undertakes.

Together, the Board brings expertise spanning University of Cape Town academic research, international public law, drug-policy reform at Commission on Narcotic Drugs level, frontline harm-reduction delivery, UNODC-commissioned research, criminal-justice practice, and non-profit financial governance. This is the governance depth serious institutional partners should expect.

For governance enquiries, please contact the Board via stacey@standaction.co.za, for the attention of the Board of Directors.

Stacey Doorly-Jones is the founder and Chief Executive of STAND, and an independent senior consultant. She designs, leads, and delivers complex programmes, and builds the systems, relationships, and processes that let separate institutions deliver as one.

Over three decades her career has moved from financial services and corporate change management into public health, gender justice and complex institutional reform. That arc is unusual, and it is the point: she pairs the discipline of enterprise change leadership with the credibility of someone who has held her own at the executive boardroom table and in district coordination rooms, law-enforcement training environments and rural referral pathways. In her earlier corporate career she personally generated more than R850 million in new business at a 92% client-retention rate, and ranked among the country's top financial-services consultants during her years at TMA and Old Mutual. Her defining strength is translating strategy and evidence into implementation that functions in practice.

She operates with equal fluency in a donor briefing room, a municipal coordination meeting, a community-based field assessment, and a high-stakes proposal process, adapting how she communicates to each audience without ever diluting the substance.