I was wonderfully surprised and very pleased indeed to receive notification through GivenGain of your project to raise funds for the James House Isibindi project by climbing Kilimanjaro. I can say without fear of contradiction that no-one has ever gone to so much trouble on our behalf. It is a fantastic initiative, and I am deeply grateful to you for taking on this daunting challenge in support of our work.
– Managing Director, James House
James House has been active in the community of Hout Bay for 25 years and is very well known within the community having helped over 700 individuals including children young adults and families as a whole. The families that James House assist have fallen through the cracks and receive no assistance from the government or national or local government, their intervention is as a last resort and sometimes literally lifesaving.
They have 27 members of staff and 20 Volunteers.
James House’s Mission Statement is to Care, Protect and Transform.
They have three programmes that are available:
The whole community will benefit from this programme as they help families by for example making sure the children are attending school and keeping them away from crime by offering them a place to come whilst parents are at work. In many cases a child will be caring for a sick parent or siblings, the James House facility gives them an escape and somewhere they can be free of responsibility and enjoy just being a child for a short time.
This programme offers help for young people that are unemployed or out of education, it aims to get them back on track and then hopefully to be able to assist with opportunities at the end of the programme. This work helps reduce crime within the community and gives the young adults activities and a distraction to avoid them getting in to trouble. Many of these young people come back to James House on internships to help others as they were helped.
The residential area only holds 15 children which is by design as James House only take children in very extreme conditions where they had no choice but to remove the child from their previous environment. They try and re house them with extended family but it is not always possible as they believe rehousing a child is very distressing and it really is a last resort. Within the residential care programme they provide counselling, therapy and homework help to ensure the children are kept on track.
James house only gets 20% of government funding a year and has to find 80% of the funding from private sources which is a constant struggle but they are supported by other organisations such as The Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund and The National Lottery.
We have visited the charity and are working with them to see how we can best assist and support their work and to create a long term relationship.