​Working with Children in Care

 

We believe that every child deserves a family. While children's homes provide essential protection, they are not a long-term solution. Many children in the care system can experience secondary trauma from institutional living and fear a future without family.

Our goal is to help children in homes find a path to a stable and loving family environment. We focus on two main objectives:

• Family Reunification: We work directly with Child and Youth Care Centres (CYCCs) to help safely reunite children with their biological families.

• Preventing Homelessness: For youth who cannot return home, we provide support and training to help them find alternative family arrangements, such as with a community member from a local church. This helps them transition into adulthood and avoid homelessness.

 

Please Note

 

We are not an adoption agency. We cannot assist with abandoned babies or help individuals looking to adopt a child. Our work is strictly focused on helping children already in the care system, either by reuniting them with family or by preventing them from becoming homeless as they "age out" of the system.

​

All individuals who work with us are thoroughly screened, police-checked, and vetted to ensure they meet our child protection policy requirements before having any direct contact with children.

​

That’s where we come in. We have a number of objectives:

• To work with the leadership, management and boards of Child and Youth Care Centres (CYCC – ‘Children’s homes’) and assist with technical and practical development in terms of re-unifying children with family.

• For those who cannot return home we offer support and training to help the CYCC look at and support alternative family engagements

•  To offer strengths-based development for the CYCC and youth

• Engage the local church community to offer a home, a place on the sofa or seat at the dinner table, allowing young people to have an on-going and consistent expression of family.

• We offer adoption support, foster carer support and family repatriation support. 

• We have the opportunity to be a significant adult in the life of a child in care. 

​

Research indicates that up to 80% of children in children homes actually have family. In fact, the irony of this is that many children actually go ‘home’ over long holiday periods. It is a tragic situation, that has evolved in part due to the HIV pandemic, but of the estimated 4miilion orphans in South Africa about 22,000 children live in children’s homes. Just imagine what a time as this we are in. an opportunity to help families re-connect and grow together, forever.

​

​​