A New year, A New you, A new Dream for our children!
Friends welcome to 2024. The year is already gaining momentum and who can believe it’s already February! Before we get busy with the demands of the new year, I want to take a few minutes of your time to reflect a bit on the year that was 2023 but most importantly to look ahead and share with you some of our exciting news as we endeavour to ensure that we give all our children a new dream a new passion and a new determination. In the reporting period, 2022- 2023, we supported over 20 000 children with a diverse range of interventions including nutrition, reading clubs computer skills as well as school after care and homework support.
While 2023 was a hard year especially from a funding perspective, I am so elated to look back on the results achieved in that year. Over 23 000 children from poor, marginalised and unequal communities were assisted with nutritious meals and accesses a variety of educational enrichment support activities that included reading clubs, homework support clubs, computer programs as well as numerous child-friendly fun and games in our child destination centres across our 3 provinces of Gauteng, Free State and Limpopo. Youth and adults were also engaged in various enterprise and skills development programmes which assisted to transform household economies for the benefit of their children.
Looking ahead, ACFS is resolved to create a new impact for all our children in which their dreams are nurtured, protected, amplified but never deferred!
We intend to continue building our child destination centres to ensure that all poor children who walk into these centres will actually feel at home, be inspired and leave every day, a better and more capable person than when they came. We will, and must include communities and support them to thrive so that they can sustainably provide for their children and withstand unforeseen shocks.
To achieve this clear vision where no child is left behind, we require a robust team that works together to achieve more. As director I’m making it my mission to ensure that all our staff are better supported, trained and monitored to ensure they remain committed to the cause of children, that they believe in being Dream Enhancers for all children and not dream killers.
My team also depends on you. Without your valuable support all our efforts will remain unfulfilled reams. This would indeed be tragic for our children. I promise to come back to you each quarter to let you know how we are getting along and what we will focus on every quarter. (In this quarter January – March, we are focussed on getting out children back to school.) We would appreciate any donation to help us get all our children settled into school and pre-school programmes. No help is too small.
I would love to hear back from you with your comments, suggestions and even just words of encouragement. Please do, send an email when you can. I invite you to all our social media plat forms and our website where you will remain engaged with all the activities that we get up to in all our centres.
I wish you a productive year ahead and invite you to join our team as we endeavour to bring to reality every child’s dream.
Executive Directors Message
Bertha
Magoge
ACFS Director
Bertha@acfs.org.za