Project News  

A New Volunteer Makes an Impact  

Katrina Luthy-Kaplan is an occupational therapist from Portland, Oregon, and is currently working at three Tremendous Hearts' sites. Most mornings, she teams up with veteran Tremendous Hearts volunteer and physical therapist Becky Molinini at Sibongile. Their combined skillsets - OTs focus on the upper body and smaller motor skills, while PTs work mostly with the lower body's large motor skills - are proving to have an exponential effect on the progress of the children. One of our most eager to please, nicknamed Big Show, is currently working with both volunteers. While Becky helps him build his core strength by working on standing up, Katrina teaches him to self-feed.

In addition to her work at Sibongile, Katrina is visiting the Abaphumeleli Place of Safety, one of our newest partner organizations. The children in care at Abaphumeleli range in age from three to eighteen, and have been removed from family care due to abuse or neglect and placed there temporarily (sometimes for up to two years) by the South African courts.  Katrina is working with a small group of teenaged girls to develop life skills.

Our newest volunteer does not seem to rest. Katrina is also working at the Nonceba Family Counselling Centre. Nonceba, which means "sympathy" in isiXhosa, is the only center in Khayelitsha for children who have been raped or sexually abused, although country statistics say that one-in-three South African children have suffered such violence.  The centre includes a safe house, counseling programs for the children and their families, and mitigation strategies within the larger community. Katrina is helping conduct Nonceba's abuse awareness and prevention training in the local schools.

When you are hiring someone for one of the most important jobs in the world, you need to make sure you get it right. There is no room for error. The stakes are too high.

They are even higher when you are filling the role of mother for six children in foster care, all of whom are suffering from a broad mix of medical and psychological pressures.

Six months ago, Home from Home's hiring and screening process for its foster mothers was providing the organization with some wonderful, strong caregivers, but also some who were not successfully leading their foster families. The organization's leadership recognized that not all children in their foster care community were thriving at home. They acted quickly. While making immediate and decisive changes for the children who were struggling, they were also ready to create a sustainable, more robust hiring model for the future.

As a first step in this process, they invited Tremendous Hearts founder Marilyn Votaw to lead a team through a review and rebuild of their hiring and screening process. The team included the co-directors, three social workers, a psychologist, a volunteer with human resources expertise, and a University of Cape Town professor of child welfare.

Marilyn took the team through a development cycle that started with identifying what the qualities of the ideal foster mother were, what in the existing process was not effective, as well as examples of best hiring practices from other child welfare organizations in Cape Town and beyond.

The need for more in-depth psychological testing prior to hire was on the table early on.

This grew from a growing organizational appreciation for the complexity of the children's needs coming into their care, and an understanding that the job of foster mom - especially in a community suffering from poverty, high HIV infection rates and high drug and alcohol abuse - is an incredibly stressful one.

The woman who gets the job must be reliable, capable and truly grasp that she is walking into a lifetime commitment.  It's a vocation, not just a job. The team kept coming back to the ideas that "we're hiring people to be mothers" and "it should be hard to become a foster mother."

The new hiring process includes obtaining references from all aspects of the candidate's life (family, church, work, and friends) and a deeper conversation between candidates and the Home from Home team of social workers so that both the potential foster mom and the organization are confident about their choice.

Home from Home is currently beta-testing the new process, and plans to meet soon to review the tools, record best practices and tweak the process as needed. Moving forward, the Home from Home social workers will then follow new foster mothers to ensure that the process is helping to select better-prepared caregivers and build more successful foster families.

"This is the kind of big picture work that Home from Home looks to me for," Marilyn said, "because the staff has their hands full just paying attention to meeting the day-to-day needs of the children.  To also be able to think strategically about organization-wide change requires a different kind of focus and perspective.  With my organizational development experience and, since I'm not buried in the daily details, I can provide that kind of leadership."

Sibongile Update 

Tremendous Hearts is excited to announce that Becky Molinini, who began volunteering with us in June 2012, has extended her stay until June 2014.

Having already significantly improved the standard of care provided to the children at Sibongile, Becky's time is split between designing and delivering individualized PT care plans for children, training Sibongile staff, and advising the team on space and equipment requirements for a new building to open this summer.

She is also currently developing a 12-week program to train three existing staff members as "physio aides." After the training program and a 12-week supervision period, the candidates will be expected to score 90 percent or higher on required testing. She will create a second program for additional staff members to increase their skillsets and incorporate developmental therapies in their teaching in the daycare center. 

Becky's extension means that Sibongile will continue to benefit from her ability to build their capacity to serve these children, while simultaneously preparing the organization to hire and successfully on-board a full-time, paid South African physiotherapist.

At Tremendous Hearts, we are especially excited about the possibility of transitioning our work to a South African. It is the fruition of our capacity-building work with Sibongile and the multiple volunteers (Johan, Becky and Katrina) who have done a wonderful job at knowledge transfer to current staff. It also demonstrates how our focus on providing long-term volunteers for our partner organizations empowers them to grow and to become self-sufficient and sustainable - a true success for both the team at Sibongile and Tremendous Hearts.

A Tourist in the Township 

A tourist rarely gets the opportunity to see and feel the real soul of a place. You are there for too brief a time. The people you meet want you to see their shiny side. And you are on vacation, a time to put your feet up, turn off your brain, take in the beauty of nature and art and good food.

As a visitor in South Africa, there is so much of that beauty to experience - gorgeous beaches, lions and leopards on safari, museums, shopping, wine country and more - that you can easily forget the incredible transition and continuing struggle that is taking place there.

I had the chance, however, to visit two Tremendous Hearts worksites in the Khayelitsha township outside of Cape Town and another in  Mbekweni near Paarl. The contrast between life in Cape Town and the townships is extraordinary. My days in Cape Town, also arranged by Tremendous Hearts founder Marilyn Votaw, were spent having afternoon tea overlooking the gardens of "the Nellie", wandering the halls of the National Gallery of Art, taking photographs from Table Mountain, and "sundowners" with friends at ocean-view restaurants.

What I saw in the township added layers of a story rich with emotion, a history filled with tragedy, impossible living conditions, and a constant striving for a better life. There is a surprising order to life here, as in any neighborhood anywhere. Children go to school. People dress in their best clothes and ride the bus to work. A girl has her hair braided at the bright red barbershop while her siblings sprawl on the ground waiting outside.

In Khayelitsha, I visited a day care center for children with disabilities. Most are in foster care. Caregivers, most with little training, are teaching the children to self-feed, stand up or walk. Tremendous Hearts has placed volunteer therapists at Sibongile for three straight years. The staff depends on them for advice on how best to work with the children, processes for record-keeping and a better understanding of medications. Tremendous Hearts has also helped them with capacity building so that the center now qualifies for much-needed government funding.

We then visited the Abaphumeleli Place of Safety, where one woman provides a home for nearly 30 children. She says she receives government grants to support only six official foster children. The others have been brought to her when they have been abused or neglected. Her house is too full. There are not enough bunk beds. There is not enough food. Some of the children have HIV, but she shakes her head, "They are healthy." The children follow her through the house, holding her hand, coming to her to settle a disagreement. Some stay for as long as two years. Some bounce back and forth between Abaphumeleli and family, and call "Aba" home. A Tremendous Hearts volunteer provides after-school homework help and plays games with the little ones.

Our third stop is the Masazane Soup Kitchen in Mbekweni, which Tremendous Hearts volunteers helped create with six grannies who serve as foster mothers for nearly 150 children between them. Now they also serve one meal a day, five days a week to the community's hungry children after school. Some days, there are 400 mouths to feed. The grannies take turns, three working each day. One constantly washes bowls by hand, because there are not enough to meet the numbers lining up. Chickens wander through the yard of the church that has granted them the spot of land. We drop off supplies. A little boy flirts with us. A girl giggles and watches before deciding we can be friends. We hear that there have been robberies in recent weeks of both the churches and schools, but the grannies claim they are not afraid.

As a tourist in South Africa, I hear again and again how forgiveness has washed over the country since the end of Apartheid, how quickly the people are moving forward. You see evidence of that everywhere.

But the road is still long, and the resources too few. As a tourist, I was lucky to see what it takes merely to survive for the orphans and most vulnerable children of South Africa - mostly, it seems, the kindness and commitment of a handful of volunteers - South African and American -- who cannot turn a child away.

Tremendous Hearts is planning a Tour for funders, friends, and potential volunteers in 2014.If South Africa is on your "bucket list", I cannot imagine a better way to see and understand the country. Find out more at www.tremendoushearts.org.

Umission Person of the Week 

Marilyn Votaw was honored as the Umission Person of the Week for identifying her mission to improve the lives of South Africa's most vulnerable children and successfully pursuing that mission as a catalyst and bridge-builder through Tremendous Hearts. In her interview, she said, "Sometimes people get to be quite old and never have the experience of knowing what their purpose is, but I had the great experience of seeing it all line up."

Umission is a giving community that supports mission-driven people and organizations in pursuit of their mission. Honored organizations include Tremendous Hearts, Disabled Sports USA, Foster and Adoptive Care Coalition, World Wildlife Fund, the Wounded Warriors Project, Coat-A-Kid and many more since the Umission inception in 2012. 

Currently, we are seeking volunteer professionals who can devote 6 months or more of service. This time period allows volunteers to get up to speed and make a significant difference in the lives of both the children and caregivers with whom we work. There is an especially intense need - and we hear it from every organization here - for professionals who can provide counseling and emotional support to our caregivers, all of whom are under stress and many of whom have suffered tremendous loss and abuse throughout their lives, yet continue to find the strength to care for children in need.

Of course, Tremendous Hearts welcomes volunteer professionals with other expertise as well, including: physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech and language pathology, fundraising, business, athletics, education, and more!