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Profile on Child-Headed Households

. Child-Headed Household (CHH) families are effectively without proper adult leadership and supervision. By and large, the children are left to fend for themselves. Some households are headed by children or teenagers with no adult supervision at all. CHH has the resources to work with 27 families only, involving about 90 children which is only scratching the surface of the need. Rays of Hope would like to increase the footprint of this project in Alex,

What is the need that CHH addresses in Alex? Alexandra, as in most South African townships, has pockets of extreme poverty. Families live in dire circumstances and living conditions are terrible; even dangerous. People are crowded and at risk from the elements, disease and crime. The most vulnerable are the children. What has caused these living conditions? Poverty never has a single cause: unemployment, substance abuse, lack of money, physical and mental abuse, the absence of parents and significant role models has combined to leave children in an extremely vulnerable state. Are the Child-Headed Households devoid of adults and parents? Not necessarily, but all of them have vulnerable children because the families are effectively without proper adult leadership and supervision. By and large, the children are left to fend for themselves. Some households are headed by children or teenagers with no adult supervision at all. Why doesn’t Rays of Hope place these children into a home or shelter? We believe that it’s better to work with a family unit, however dysfunctional, rather than to move the child out. That way we try to get the entire family unit to be functional, thus giving the child a proper platform. Removing children means that we have to return them at some stage to a dysfunctional home environment. How many people are currently helped? Right now, we only have the resources to work with 27 families, involving about 90 children. We are only scratching the surface, but we choose to work intensively with fewer people and get the job done properly. Our children are all of school-going age, ranging from grade one to matric. How do you help these families? Whatever is needed, a whole range of things is done to assist them. We deal with all types of abuse; issues of food security and safety in the home; we see to the educational needs of the children as far as we can; there are often issues of mental health; and we deal with registration of the children and obtain essential items such as ID documents. Ultimately, we try to build sustainable family units. What is your ultimate goal with the programme? Our goal is the build up a sustainable family unit within three years at most. By then they are prepared to “fly solo” as it were, and Rays of Hope can assist more vulnerable or needy families. What do volunteers do at CHH? They are the core, the heart of our work. They are indispensable and brilliant! They are endlessly patient and work with the families in their home environments. They are effectively “on call” 24/7 and sometimes even go to houses at night to sort out problems. They interface with authorities from time to time in terms of social support, crime prevention and getting essential documents. What are the spin-off programmes that have grown out of CHH? We work together with Ikhaya Lomusa, the child & youth care centre that is also part of the RoH setup. They have a Resource Centre, which is used for many other projects, which are allied to our initiatives. At the Resource Centre we run a homework club for schoolchildren on four weekday afternoons. This is a safe environment which offers assistance with learning as well as games, and a place to enjoy the time after school. Then we have the Girls Support Group, which is a peer-driven initiative for teenage girls to address their own unique issues and challenges. Finally there is our Boys of Hope soccer club, which has grown incredibly in a short space of time. We have developed four teams in different age groups. With the guidance of top-class coaches our teams are improving tremendously. These team sports teach young men important life skills such as sharing, goal setting and hard work. Soccer also keeps them focussed away from issues like drugs and gangs. What are your plans for 2016 for CHH? We want to carry on the work we are doing. We are successful at it and want to hone our skills and get better at what we do Naturally, we would like to increase our footprint in Alex as there is so much need, but to accomplish that we require additional finances and skilled staff and volunteers.

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