MDP322: Clinical Community Work – Kidz Care Trust

Mission:

To re-unite streetchildren with their parents or communities as soon as possible.
To provide appropriate residential facilities until this is achieved, or where it is not possible until they are accepted by the appropriate service provider.

Unknowingly, it seems as if the community from Bloemfontein contributes to children living on the streets. They do this by giving them money and food when they beg for it on the streets. These children could actually be better empowered if they can be placed at, amongst other, a safe shelter or if they could return home to their parents. The students addressed this issue by taking part on a show on Radio Lesedi, distributing pamphlets designed by themselves and also placing an article in a local newspaper, Ons Stad.

The focus of the students was to inform the community on what they could do to help these children. By 30 May 2012 it was reported that, based on this campaign, 11 children were removed from the streets and placed at Kidz Care Trust, a safe shelter for street children. After the talk show on Radio Lesedi on 30 April 2012, many people contacted the shelter to offer their help and support.

Article in Ons Stad: Kidz Care Trust cares for Street Kids (translated)

The student social workers of the University of the Free State have observed through their project that their is an alarming increase in the number of underage children living and working on the streets of Bloemfontein.

These children fight for survival by various and at most times unorthodox ways due to their basic needs such as shelter, food, clothing, love, care and access to an education not being met.

There are several factors contributing to the increasing number of street children and these include:

• Physical and emotional abuse experienced at home.
• Poverty resulting from their parents' unemployment status.
• Parents and family members neglecting their children's basic needs.
• Failure to provide for their educational needs.
• Broken family relationships and conflict within the family due to divorce, death or imprisonment of a parent.
• Street parents giving birth to children on the street.

Fortunately, there are organisations aimed at helping these children get off the streets and live a better life, by providing them with services that would meet their basic needs so that their social functioning can improve, and one of them is Kidz Care Trust, which is under the management of Miss Fadzayi Matongo, a social worker.

Kidz Care Trust is a non-governmental organisation working with vulnerable and underage children (under 18 years) and who, in partnership with Park Road Police Station, render services at its Drop-In Centre where the children on a weekly basis are provided with meals, hot showers, clean clothes, as well as spiritual upliftment.

The organisation also has a child- and youth-care centre which renders various services, residential care programmes and access to formal schooling.

As community members are also affected by the street children phenomenon based from the students' analysis and interaction with the street children, it is suggested that the community can also help decrease the number of street children in Bloemfontein by taking note of the following: