TCB opens its doors in Salt River, Cape Town.
Originally called The Clothing Bank, TCB started it’s life in a double garage made available by the local municipality and a large stock donation from Woolworths. Our co-founders, Tracey Chambers and Tracey Gilmore, recruited unemployed mothers through The Volunteer Centre and started training them to buy and sell clothing.  

We out grew our first premises and moved to a rental property in Observatory scaling to 100 women in the programme. More retailers liked Edcon and MRP came on board.

We open a branch in Paarl and start our Micro Franchise Accelerator Project. TCB wins the Teach a Man to Fish Award. We start our journey with the A2B development methodology.

We expand to Johannesburg and win the African Philanthropy Award: New Charity of the Year award. We form a strategic training relationship with The Tourism and Business Institute of South Africa (TTBISA) to train our second-year Participants in the Informal Small Business Practice (ISBP), which provides them with a SETA-accredited qualification. We start the Greenlight Movement (formerly Poverty Stoplight) in South Africa and start measuring our poverty eradication impact.

We start the GROW Educare Centres programme (later renamed to Grow ECD) in Cape Town. Co-founder Lisa Voortman sets up our first ECD centre partnership in Langa. 

We open our TCB Durban and East London branches and purchase our first building in Cape Town. With a national footprint, TCB could now support many more retailers to redistribute their excess products.  We start our Repair programme in response to growing volumes of appliance donations. Our Amazi Beauty Project is launched in partnership with Sorbet.

Our co-founders receive the Schwab Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award and become Schwab fellows.

We win the Western Cape Premier’s Award: Best Overall Business and Best Social Enterprise.

We expand our GROW project to Durban and purchased our Durban property. Tracey Chambers (Co-Founder and CEO) is awarded an Ashoka Fellowship.

Our Cape Town building is destroyed in a devastating fire (rebuild completed in 2021). We expand our GROW Programme to Johannesburg.

Covid19 hits our Participants and ECD centres hard. With the support of our partners, we use our warehouse spaces to offer food parcel distribution, essential service goods such as winter clothing, and stipends to assist ECD teachers who have lost all sources of income.  

We started a new programme, Remake, to work with seamstresses and use donations of excess fabric to start micro-manufacturing small businesses. TCB won the Mail & Guardian Greening the Future Award (category Waste Management Best Practice). Our Resell and Repair programme is listed in the international Acumen “100 Corporate Ready Social Enterprises” report. We launch the GROW ECD Mobile App.

We launched our first Graduate Accelerator. The Clothing Bank rebranded as Taking Care of Business, our new group name, which houses all our programmes and subsidiaries. We launch our media-rich online ECD Curriculum and our ECD Small Business Accelerator programme. We also launch our Baby Curriculum for 1-2 year olds. TCB is awarded the World of Difference Award by The International Alliance for Women.

We expand our Remake programme in Cape Town. We launch the A2B Human Optimisation curriculum and our new Year 2 Business Booster programme. Tracey Chambers and Tracey Gilmore, our TCB co-founders, received a Cape Town Civic Honours Award from the Mayor of Cape Town. We are awarded the Social Impact Award at the annual Twyg Sustainable Fashion Awards.

We launch our Reskill training division which ensures our impactful training programmes are now made available to other organisations. Our Repair programme starts measuring and reporting on tonnes of eWaste processed. Our Remake programme expands to include a Technical curriculum.

Our Grow ECD programme joins the Government’s Intersectoral Forum and Social Compact for ECD in support of the 2030 ECD Strategy. Tracey Chambers in invited to join the World Economic Forum Future Council on Financial Education working group. We purchase a building in Johannesburg to support our growing operations and set us up in a new, permanent, home.