Cape Kids Foundation grants Cape Flats teens the power of family and dreams – Vicky Bauer
The Cape Flats in South Africa is an area plagued by gang violence and drug abuse. The situation has been so dire that the army was sent into the townships in 2019 to control the situation. Exposure to the violence is particularly distressing for children who are caught in the crossfire. It is for these children that the Cape Kids Foundation, a non-profit organisation based in Muizenberg in the Western Cape, aims to ensure better outcomes. The Foundation takes in teens from the age of 14 and provides learning support for them throughout their adult life. Vicky Bauer, the Director of the Foundation, said in an interview with BizNews that the foundation, established in 2017, is for curious and determined young people who come to them for a place where they can feel safe and experience the power of being part of a family. From their initial program working with young adults, the foundation has evolved into a residential program with a strong emphasis on trauma counselling, and a school, the Alex School, was established in Muizenberg. Bauer said that The Cape Kids Foundation is in the process of designing an outdoor environmental education program on a site that they have acquired on a mountain peak in Glencairn. They are clearing the site of alien vegetation and making it safe for the neighbourhood that has experienced devastating wildfires in the past. She highlighted that students who come to them are children who don't have dreams because they are merely surviving – Linda van Tilburg
Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.
Watch here
Relevant timestamps from the interview
- 00:00 – Introduction
- 00:32 – Aim of cape kids foundation
- 09:11 – Alex school building in Muizenberg
- 10:36 – Success stories
- 14:48 – The project on Glen Cane Ridge to clear alien vegetation
- 16:12 – Future plans
- 18:04 – Why Muizenberg
- 18:45 – Commitment to the Western cape
- 20:50 – Conclusion
Listen here
Excerpts from the interview
Taking teens out of devastating trauma to change their life trajectory
We started working with grassroots-level Non Governmental Organisations (NGO) and families who wanted to make their environment a better place and asked them whether we could support them financially so that they could do their magic within their suburbs and in the townships. Through working with them, they started coming to us about young adults who were curious and determined despite their situation. They wanted their life trajectory to change and they wanted to improve who they were.
That led to us becoming involved with these young people directly. We decided that these young adults wanted more than the education system could provide them at their township schools or the Model-C schools. So, in our desire to do the right thing, we took them out of the environment that they were in and we placed them into private schools, working very closely with the heads of the school, with the dorm parents and with the sports coaches. We ensured that they had the uniforms and the technology and they had lifts to and from school. We also provided sponsorship for older children to go to tertiary environments, to go to colleges like UCT, FEDISA and, City varsity.
Creating a permanent space during the pandemic
We observed that the tertiary students who were living in a residential environment near their colleges weren't thriving as much as the students who were living in-house with dorm parents and were surrounded by functional relationships and interested adults. At the same time, COVID-19 presented itself, and we were thrust into the townships to work and support the families of the students that we had been sponsoring at high schools and tertiary programs. Many of them had lost their jobs, and they were not able to feed their families. A lot of them were matriarchs, great aunts or grannies, who all of a sudden had five or six young ones in the home who weren't going to school, weren't getting fed at school, and a lot of them had lost their jobs. It allowed us to go into the townships and see first-hand how the families and single parents were coping and how traumatic these environments were.
It led to a bit of an aha moment. The three of us were having a Zoom call as we do every Thursday, and we had to admit that life had brought us to a point where we needed to decide whether we were going to bring education and trauma therapy in-house. Seeing how best we could support these students who were determined and curious in outside institutions and then going back to their homes wasn't doing them the service that we wanted to provide.
Alex School, students select themselves
In 2020, in the middle of the year, we opened our doors and took in what is now known as Alex School in Muizenberg. The Cape Kids Foundation as we know it now was created. The program takes on a child at the age of 14, who goes through a rigorous assessment program. These children come to the foundation, they have already selected themselves for the program. They go through a rigorous assessment program and then they are with the foundation for four years of their high school. The program provides a trauma-sensitive high school environment in Muizenberg.
The students live with the foundation from Sunday to Friday. They have breakfast, lunch, and dinner with the foundation. There are trauma-educated dorm parents, mentors, after school clubs, swimming, mountain biking, mountaineering, and mental health practitioners assigned to each student. The foundation strongly encourages emotional healing because most of these children have experienced devastating trauma due to the environment that has been created in South Africa.
An eight-to-10-year programme to become socially, emotionally and financially independent adults
It starts with Alex School, and then we provide sponsorship for tertiary education. We strongly encourage our tertiary students to live on campus as well. We have several buildings in the Muizenberg area. One of them is the tertiary building, which has a dorm parent and is all secure with alarms and all the good stuff so they can feel safe. They live there, and we ensure that they get to their tertiary education. Then we have a post-graduation program, which is their final year with us, where we really focus on making them socially, emotionally, and financially independent. It's an eight to ten-year program, but we've chosen to go few and deep because we believe in changing the trajectory of the family. It starts with taking time and healing individuals on a very deep level.
We have The Cape Kids Foundation, and then underneath Cape Kids, we have Alex School, which is run by our educational principal Bronwyn. We have three teachers, and we can take a maximum of 12 students. Next door to Alex School, we have a dorm environment for these students. That's called Sea Cottage, because the viewand it's right at the seafront of Muizenberg; that's where they live.
Tertiary level support at Alex Village
Around the corner, we have the tertiary environment, which is called Alex Village. That's six apartments where our tertiary students have more independent living. But again, it's compulsory. They come to our workshops, they have to see a mental health practitioner, they've got to learn how to drive, we do financial workshops, we have 'Race within South Africa' workshops, we have nutrition workshops, and we have sexual health and diversity workshops which they have to attend but they live more independently than our high school students. We also sponsor students at private schools, and the only reason they don't live with us is that they are thriving and their family environments are a little bit more supportive.
Environmental education programme in Glencairn, making it safe for the neighbourhood
Besides what Cape Kids is doing now, we have three programs that we want to develop, and one of them is an outdoor environmental education program. We are fortunate enough to have access to a mountain peak called Froneberg, which is the next peak over from Elsie's Peak in Glencairn. We've registered it and are working privately to get it to a place where it is safe for the neighbourhood. We're getting rid of all the exotic vegetation and managing the burning of all the dead wood. Then we're going to introduce specialists who can look at indigenous pollinators and get in some of the fynbos. At that stage, we want to get our 24 to 25 students involved and learn about what it takes to care for our environment. The site (bought by Peter Bauer) is unconditionally lent to Cape Kids to be able to use that space.
Future plans: After-school learning club and alumni programme
We have about another 40 potential students that we want to bring into Cape Kids. We did start at the beginning of last year, designing a learning club where we take the siblings of our students and invite them to an office. It is an after school club, but we're specifically calling it a learning club because it's going to be about the power of reading and the power of maths. So, it's not going to be about doing the homework that they're getting at their township or their Model C schools. It's going to be the fundamental building blocks of reading and maths.
We have a full-time social worker who's going to be joining us in July, which we're incredibly excited about. We'll have two full-time social workers, and this social worker will be assigned to the learning club. When the students come in, we're looking at students from six years to 14 years of age. There's going to be nutrition, and we're going to be doing remedial and fundamental learning. we're going to have a social and emotional well-being component to that as well. It's going to kind of run parallel with Alex's school. We're going to have the learning club, and the environmental education program, and now that we have graduates, we're going to need to look at an alumni programme.
The power of functional role models, allowing children to dream
I think bringing up our children and always being interested in emotional well-being, the power of family and the power of having functional role models is so important to allow a human being to dream their dreams and to be able to be who they want to be. We knitted that all together, and we've seen it firsthand. These children, these students don't have dreams because they're surviving and it's no fault of their parents or their family environment, as I said before.
As soon as we can put them in a place where they feel safe and the power of a family, we really do ask ourselves the question, if these were my children, what would I do? If these students were my children or our children, how would we treat them? So, our entire village at CapeKids is about trauma awareness and treating them like we would our own children. It is very functional. It's a mix and match of everything, and we've just got the right people working with us. I take my hat off to the 23 staff members we have. We all want the best for the next generation, and that's how we kind of came to create the Cape Kids Foundation.
Read also: