success in life - for youth, by youth
sport
In communities like ours, sport has extra benefits, besides the well known 'healthy body - healthy mind'. Competitions give youth a rare opportunity to meet people from other communities and interact as equals. Successes in sport has much more impact than success in education. A 99% for maths goes unnoticed, competing in world championships is big in the newspaper and excites the community to an extent that people start believing in success, and for example go back to school.
healthy living
Like in many impoverished communities, unsafe sex, drugs and alcohol are taking a heavy toll. We encourage safe sex and have condoms available in our office. We fight a tough battle against substance abuse, losing some of our long term members. We can't allow them in our programme, but we offer them counselling by social work at the hospital, as a path back into our programme. Shaun Shelly: "The impact of apartheid cannot be understated: communities were displaced and dispossessed, narrative histories destroyed and families split. All of this has led to high levels of psychosocial dislocation, which, as renowned psychology professor Bruce Alexander has convincingly argued, leads to higher levels of drug use and addiction."
eat well
You can't train your body and brain on an empty stomach! Hunger is a hidden problem. Many of our youth experience times in the month when their families run out of food. Medical and sports professionals identified clear signs of malnutrition in our members. When we got aware of the scale of the problem we introduced meals during our lessons and porridge any time of the day, but only for active members with high attendance to our programme.
