Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Sustainable community development






 We are currently lucky enough to have two long term interns with us in Gordon’s Bay. They have recently completed their projects and are now on their work placements. Both projects fit into how we, as an organisation, would like to develop our role in the communities we work in, in Cape Town.
Sarah has been working at Ikhayalethemba, specifically developing a special needs training package that she will, in her placement capacity, deliver to new volunteers.  As the orphanage is soon to open a specific centre for the special needs children there, this particular training will be vital for the continued development of our special needs understanding and programme. Her initial training session was a great success and Sarah will continue this as she works with us at Ikhayalethemba. She will also develop the individual children’s profiles so that the work we do can become more and more tailored to their specific needs.
Corina has been working at our Grade R project site, developing the structure and routine of the work that we do there, assisting the grade R teacher. But her project has been focusing on the work experience placements that we are hoping to develop across many of our project sites. The first one that is in the initial stages, is a placement working as an assistant librarian at ACJ. We already have the lucky student and we are putting the final touches to his schedule and he will start soon to make the books of ACJ library accessible to the students and teachers.  In addition to this, Corina has been working on a presentation and workshop to deliver to a group of local high school students and teachers to engage them in the idea and hopefully find our next placement student so that we can expand the programme.
The work that both Corina and Sarah are doing is crucial to the way that we hope to move forward with our community partners in Cape Town and we owe them a big debt of thanks for the hard work that they are putting in, it really will make a big difference.
Melanie Welfare- Internship Coordinator





Share/Save/Bookmark

0 comments: