Persoonlijke noot van Valencia Kock – oprichtster Khaya centre Mount Olive

Khaya Centre identified 30 youth that showed potential to become leaders in the community. These children are a mixed of boys and girls between the ages of 13 and 18. All these children are from home with little or no income. This program is called Young Life Leaders.  (YL).

Rene and his sister Iete  visited our centre in  2011 and immediately committed themselves to helping our community. The assistance they gave us helped the project to continue with the training and support on these young people. The young life program is set to create opportunities for these children to live their full potential by supporting them with school clothes, food parcels, after school lessons, computer lessons and most lately Driving Licenses.

The results that have been achieved thus far though the support of the program has been most rewarding. We have been getting 100% pass rate for all the children in the last three years. Two of the boys are now in their final year of school. One of the boys ( Brian) would have left school by now because he does not have a father and his mother is very sick. Brian would have had to leave school so that he can help support  the family and he also could not afford to continue. Through the help and support we receive from the foundation, we are able to pay for Brian to remain in school, give his family a food parcel and are also currently ensuring that he gets extra lessons from a tutor as Brian would like to become an Engineer.

The second project that the foundation is supporting in our community is to help those that do not have South African Identity Documents. If a person don’t have an Identity Document than they cannot apply for any assistance from the government and they cannot even go to university and seek for employment. So far we have helped families to apply and the most successful stories are the mother with the disabled child that now receives a disabled grant for her child and a grant for herself so she can now support her family. We have also been able to assist a young man to obtain his Identity document and he is currently studying.

To retain qualified staff has also been a problem to our organization because we could not pay a better salary so the staff would leave once they’ve been trained. The trust now pays for the youth councillor and an administrator to assist me with the running of the youth program as well as the running of the centre. This has been a great help to the organization as we now have more qualified people in place and the centre is more stable.

Valencia Kock – Project Director