South Africa
We work with four organisations in South Africa: The Future Factory, Seawind Educare Centre, the Friends of the Children's Hospital Association and The Sarah Fox Children’s Convalescent Hospital.
We are happy that CHW managed to link The Future Factory and Seawind Educare, while our founder, Catherine, was visiting Cape Town. The Future Factory supports schools and creches, as well as running other projects, and will now include Seawind Educare in its programmes. We would also like to thank Sarah, who volunteered at Seawind Educare, for introducing the creche to CHW in the first place.
The Future Factory
The Future Factory runs structured sports programmes in over fifty schools in the Western Cape. It also runs feeding schemes, and supports other feeding programmes run by different local organisations and helps to support schools and creches.
The Future Factory was started by Anne Siroky, who was South Africa's number one volleyball player in 2000. After retiring, she decided to share her volleyball skills with schoolchildren, but realised that there were no sports programmes operating in the local schools, and started the Future Factory.
CHW hopes to fundraise for various programmes run by the Future Factory. We held a coin collection to raise money to buy soccer balls for the sports programmes, so that more children could take part. We raised four hundred and twenty-eight pounds. Thank you to everyone who took part. As well as fundraising for specific projects, we would also like to help with the general operational costs of the organisation. This will allow the Future Factory staff to run their programmes even more efficiently, which will greatly benefit every single child they reach through their work.
The Seawind Educare Centre
Many of the children attending this creche live in townships and other poor areas. The creche was started by Rita Benjamin, who had a desire to help children. As well as being taught and cared for, the creche provides a meal for the children each day. CHW would like to help Rita give these children the best possible start to life.
So far, we have given a donation to buy food for the children, and a donation which will be used for necessary paint work for the building used by the creche. Both donations were raised at separate bag packing fundraisers. Thank you to all the volunteers who took part.Rita is now opening a second creche and needs funds for items such as cots, tables, chairs, a stove, a fridge, curtains and blinds. If you can help, please visit our 'donate' page.
The Friends of the Children's Hospital Association
The Friends of the Children's Hospital Association (FOCHA) is a voluntary support group to the Red Cross War Memorial Children's Hospital. It offers emotional support and practical assistance to the patients and their families and aims to make being in hospital a less traumatic experience for the children. It does a variety of things, from co-ordinating volunteers to give attention to the children and running support groups for parents, to giving food parcels, clothing and toiletries to inpatients and their families and providing ventilation machines and transportation to and from clinics. We want to fundraise to help support FOCHA's great work, helping the children at the hospital.
The entrance to the hospital
The Sarah Fox Children’s Convalescent Hospital
The Sarah Fox Children’s Convalescent Hospital serves as the only convalescent hospital for children in the Western Cape, with children being referred to it from other hospitals and institutions. It aims to provide professional care, in a homely and loving environment, to enable full recovery once the critical stages of an illness have been treated.
Underprivileged families, living in deprived areas, do not have the means to nurse their children after acute illnesses or burns or to provide the holistic treatment necessary for children suffering from tuberculosis (TB) or HIV/AIDS. The Sarah Fox Hospital is an essential link in the treatment of children, breaking the cycle of recurrence of sometimes fatal diseases.
Children have also been referred to the Sarah Fox Hospital simply because they have nowhere else to go. The number of abandoned children and those coming from socially unfit backgrounds is rising.
We hope to fundraise to support the children and babies helped by the Sarah Fox Hospital. It is also possible to volunteer at the Hospital.