Family Strengthening

Just surviving is not enough.

​A stable family is an important indicator of a healthy community. One way of dealing with the vulnerability of children is to make families stronger. 

Our initiatives include providing parenting and life skills support, access to grants, short term food relief, advice and referrals  for more than 240 families each year to help them stay together and find long-term solutions. 

Our  Social Justice Clinic also assists with ID, birth certificate and social welfare or grant applications. 

      Beautiful Gate helped us to get a social grant, so we can live with Gogo (granny) after mama died. They help us with food, school uniforms and someone visits each week. I feel safe now.

Helping families stay together & find long term solutions

Investing 
in our community for a brighter future

Every year we run a number of workshops to help equip parents, caregivers and the general community with important life skills and information. 

Parenting skills training

Our parenting skills training runs over 8 days (once a week), reaching a total of 120 parents each year. Topics covered include: 

• God’s heart for families
• Positive parenting (discipline)
• Disclosing secrets (including memory work, fathers and HIV status)
• Restoring family ties
• Rights and responsibilities – raising children holistically (looking at child’s gifts)
• Succession planning
• Psycho-social care and support (mainstream – not just material provision but nurturing children)
• Education, homework support and career advice
• Basic medical training

Let Your Light Shine

Our HIV intervention programme is for participants who have attended the Parenting Skills course. A total of 120 participants attend this course each year.

Let Your Light Shine identifies vulnerable or at-risk children, seeking ways to help and support children in the community. At the end of each course participants come up with a community plan of action. 

Community Mobiliser training
This training programme is run over 3 days, 3 times per year. We take 10 participants per course (30 per year) and train and mentor them as Community Mobilisers with the goal of establishing child care forums within existing community structures.

Orphan and Vulnerable Children Care

All vulnerable children and orphans are provided with individual counselling and group support sessions on various topics and needs overseen by one of our social workers.

• >  Group interventions (bereavement, illness, behavioural programmes).
• >  Psycho-social support for children: individual counselling and group sessions and/or family conferencing.

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Children at Risk

1. Children living with HIV – Supporting children who are living with HIV include support and counseling for accessing treatment, disclosure of status to friends and support groups and decisions on relationships, sexuality and reproduction. 
2. Children living with and caring for an ill parent or caregiver – these children miss out or drop out of school to care for sick adults, have concentration problems due to worrying about the sick person. 
3. Children affected by other forms of adversity – these include children who have survived physical, emotional and sexual abuse; children who witnessed the death of their parents; children who survived other frightening experiences e.g. motor car accidents. 
4. Children living in child-headed households. There are many reasons for children to live without an adult including the following;

• Parents affected by alcohol abuse and incapable of parenting 
• Orphaned children having no appointed guardian or foster parent 
• Relatives live far way or have too many dependents or do not want them
• Children choose not to be separated from siblings or don't want to abandon their home.​

In March 2015 we made the decision to close down our institutional child and youth care centre. As we come to the end of 20 years of providing formal residential child and youth care centres, we are grateful  to have been able to share in many children’s lives, bringing safety and stability, love and nurturing. 

Over the past 5 years Beautiful Gate has been building an alternative solution for community-based family care for orphans and vulnerable children, thus replacing more traditional institutional care. We are grateful to the Department of Social Development for their partnership in both establishing the Child Care Centre, as well as in helping us to make this transition to more community-based, family  oriented model. See our Family Strengthening Programme above for how this shift has been made possible.