Create Hope, Donate Today.

 Center for Hope Behavioral Health Services, LLC., is a non-profit organization whose mission is to assist individuals in our community affected by mental illness, substance abuse, trauma, and severe emotional disturbance to achieve their hopes, dreams, and quality of life goals. Services delivered will be family-focused, community and school-based, and aim at improving and enhancing family functioning, family relationships, peer relationships, mental health, educational, psychosocial needs and promoting resiliency. 

 

Center for Hope has collaborated with Ukulapha Community Outreach to provide an array of services with a focus on healing and preventing adverse experiences and toxic stress faced by many developing children, their families, and loved ones. Services include but not limited too; counseling students and parents infected and affected by HIV/AIDS, individual and family counseling, parenting classes, HIV/AIDS awareness and preventative counseling, recreational activities for students, educational training and internships for university students, and teacher workshops.   

Our fundraising initiative aims to raise money for the new building construction of Center for Hope Counseling Center that will be located on the campus of Slangspruit Primary School in the Greater Edendale Township in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. This initiative also aims to bring awareness about the impact of adversity and trauma in childhood on health and wellness throughout the lifespan.

Ukulapha Community Outreach accomplishes its humanitarian grass roots work in close collaboration with Slangspruit Primary School (SPS) in the Greater Edendale Townships (reservation) in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Our work involves holistically improving teaching and learning conditions with the children top of mind.

There are currently 1,119 students at SPS from K to grade 7 – which means that both they and their families benefit from our involvement at the school. SPS is a very underprivileged school for Zulu children, like most every school for black children in SA (a legacy of Apartheid), the school, in most every way, is grossly inadequately equipped to offer a quality education – which is essential for any young person to thrive and look forward to a productive and successful life.

This province of KwaZulu-Natal, is the epicenter for HIV/Aids in the world – SA runs the largest antiretroviral program – hence we have the desperately sad phenomenon of Aids orphans, children who have lost their parents due to Aids related illness and are being raised by their grannies, aunties or the eldest sister in the family. This means bereft youngsters, tired and sad grannies and eldest sisters, who have sacrificed their education and dreams, struggle to cope, with no-one being heard, witnessed and emotionally supported.

The townships are also poverty stricken with no running water or indoor plumbing – small and overcrowded homes – high rates of crime and violence, rape, sexual assault and femicide.

When Ukulapha first commenced its work almost 10 years ago, we were able to use a classroom to run workshops for the caregivers – back then there were only 750 children attending SPS. There is no longer space for us to use and the need for workshops of all kinds, is urgently needed so that we can support both the children and the community.

Ukulapha now has an excellent collaborative relationship with TCSES, namely TCSPP and Saybrook, with delegations of PhD students and faculty bringing study abroad programs to the school and community.

We also have Canadian interns who spend from 3 to 6 months on the ground at the school.

And we are also fortunate enough to have a close collaboration with the local campus of the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s psychology department, with their masters students delivering their community intervention program from SPS along with 1 student offering counseling services to the school and community one morning a week.

We really desperately need appropriate space that is spacious, private, adequately equipped and dedicated to the work that is essential to assist with running programs to support the school children, their teachers, caregivers and the community.

Donate today, and help us create a brighter tomorrow.