Childline: Mpumalanga

Ngo – Childline

Profile

Childline Mpumalanga has celebrated its 3rd birthday on 28 October 2006.  For the past three years this organisation has received and handled 110 904 Calls from children and adults with concerns in the province about children on the toll free Crisisline. Childline has trained over 50 volunteer counsellors in the skill of counselling children and 5 were employed on the crisisline. Seven people were enrolled to be trained as auxiliary social workers through the process and standards of the SA Council for Social Service Professions and six completed their trained and qualified as auxiliary social workers.

The organisation has visited over 25 Schools in the province and provided training to 2263 children and 322 teachers, volunteers and community members on Children’s Rights and responsibilities, Child abuse prevention, communication with children, counselling of children, violence in schools, child pornography, children and grieve and many more.

A Youth development Programme (focussing on Life Skills) was started in Kabokweni with 15 youths in 2004, were the aim is to develop youth into adults who will be able to realise their rights in the community, and since 2006, a second youth development program is running in Chweni with 14 youths. Several events were hosted for youth linked to Youth Day and National Aids day where over 1200 youths were reached.

An open air library and feeding scheme was started in Dec 2005 for about 300 children (some orphaned by the impact of HIV and Aids on their family) in Chweni and was handed over to the Chweni Community Development Forum in January 2007, who is currently running the feeding scheme from the Chweni Primary School.

Childline Mpumalanga were battling to employ a social worker (due to social workers being a scarce resource) to deal with therapy of children referred to our office. Since October 2006 we have employed a play therapy social worker and currently have two social workers (that services most of the official languages that children speak in Mpumalanga). The office has opened 55 case files where children and their families received and are still receiving services. Two social work groups for children were presented, one to children who was sexually abused and one to children who has been affected by divorce. Both groups were very successful and allowed children to heal in a safe environment and deal with the guild, anger, shame and other emotions that children were having.

The organisation participated in various national and provincial public awareness events like youth day, human rights day, Aids day and Children’s day. There is a strong advocacy and awareness responsibility to bring the voice off children to the community in Mpumalanga through networking and partnering with fellow NGO’s Government departments and Business and civil society at large.