Comprehensive Care Programmes

The comprehensive care programme is Phase 2 of the three-phase Care for Kids process in the local church. It expands the scope of orphan relief work to embrace holistic care for both the children and their carers.

Care for children

The holistic (physical, emotional, social, psychological and spiritual) care for orphans and vulnerable children which includes the following aspects:

Preparing for parent's death

The focus is to reduce the level of impact of the loss on the child and is linked to the process that involves the parents (refer to programme design page):

• To understand that the death of their parents is not a punishment.
• To be involved in deciding where they will live afterwards.
• To know what is to happen with their inheritance.

School attendance

One of the foundations of the programme is that children must remain in school in order to access or continue to access services from the programme. In order to support the children the programme helps:

• To enable children to negotiate lower school fees.
• To assist with educational materials and uniforms.
• To assist with homework.

Dealing with difficult emotions

There are many different and difficult emotions for orphans that are linked to the death of a parent. The child needs space to be able to share these emotions and volunteers are trained by Care for Kids to support the children.

These programmers are carried out through:

• Camps.
• Kids' clubs.
• After-school programmes.
• Holiday programmes.

 Preventing abuse

The programme tries to focus of abuse that is specific to orphans in particular:

• Keep watch to make sure that nobody exploits or abuses the children.
• Find ways to protect the property rights of orphans and vulnerable children.
• Help orphans and vulnerable children to access legal aid as required.

Care for carers

Types of household

To get a better understanding of the needs of carers, Care for Kids has identified four categories of households that support orphans and vulnerable children, based on who the main carer is:

• Granny-headed household: The carer is the grandmother.
• Child-headed household: The carer is an older child, aged under 21.
• Mixed household: The carer can be a family member, adult sibling (over 21), friend or foster parent, but not the grandparent.
• Household with a terminally ill parent or carer: The carer's illness prevents them from working and/or makes it difficult for them to fulfil the role of a carer (cleaning, washing, cooking, caring).

Carers can do amazing work with orphans, but sometimes feel overwhelmed by the task. Support given to carers can go a long way to ensure better care for the children. Below is an overview of the services and support for carers included in the comprehensive care programme:

Services to older carers

As part of its holistic support and care for older carers, Care for Kids:

• Raises awareness of the role that older carers play in the lives of orphans.
• Challenges community and religious leaders as well as school and clinic staff to honour and uphold the rights of the elderly.
• Helps protect older carers against abuse.
• Provides emotional support to carers who are grieving the loss of their own children.
• Helps older carers to access health care for themselves.
• Assists with home maintenance and repairs.
• Offer parenting skills training to help older carers deal with teenagers.

Services to younger carers

As part of its holistic support and care for younger carers, Care for Kids:

• Encourages and train adult mentors to support younger carers in parenting and running a household.
• Offers training in parenting skills for younger carers.
• Helps protect them against abuse.
• Supports so that they can remain in school and complete their education.

General support

Below are some of the other services that the Care for Kids comprehensive care programme can offer carers:

• Guidance on government grants eligibility and access.
• Guidance to help families respond to the psychosocial needs of orphans:
    -  understanding the impact of grief on a child
    -  communication skills.
• Support groups for carers.
• Training in the health and nutritional needs of children.
• Help with getting access to running water and electricity.
• Hygiene packs for the household, to prevent the spread of illnesses until grants are accessed.
• Training carers in the rights of children.
• Child day care to free carers to work and earn.
• Respite care (find people to look after the children for a short while to give the carer a break).
• Small business and micro-finance systems programmes.
• Help with setting up rotating savings schemes [stokvels].
• Help with debt management.
• Training and support to start a vegetable garden.

How do we develop a holistic care programme in a church?

The Care for Kids comprehensive care programme (Phase 2) builds on the skills and experience the church gained with the orphan relief programme. We can divide Phase 2 into five steps (some of which overlap):

• 1. Assessing the needs
• 2. Assessing the existing services
• 3. Determining service delivery
• 4. Equipping volunteers
• 5. Building partnerships
• 6. Ownership

1. Assessing the needs

No church should assume that it knows where and how to start responding to the needs of orphans in its community. At Care for Kids, we ask churches to use a systematic needs assessment process to determine what the needs of the children and carers their are, and to prioritise these needs. Care for Kids uses two methods of determining the needs.

• Each household is visited and assess individually.
• The Schutte Scale® Needs Assessment Model is used which involves separate focus group sessions with the orphans and the carers to determine the priorities.

2. Assessing the existing services

Care for Kids equips the church to conduct a survey of other resources and services in the community. The aim is to determine what services are already available for the children and carers. This way, we make sure we don't duplicate services that already exist in the area.

3. Determining service delivery

Care for Kids assists the church leadership to determine what services to provide for the children and their carers based on the prioritized needs assessment, the existing services in the community and the resources that are available. The key is help churches to not take on too much and develop the services over time.

3. Equipping volunteers

Each church provides volunteers for its own programme, and each volunteer focuses on one particular ministry. The time commitment is 2 to 3 hours per week, however initially the training will require additional time commitment. The training is provided free of charge on the understanding that the volunteers will be involved in ministry to the children or the cares. The type of training that is provided depends on the services that are offered, but can include:

• Basic understanding of orphans and vulnerable children.
• Needs assessment.
• Principles of a church-based orphan and vulnerable project.
• Support group facilitation.
• Lay counselling.
• Psychosocial support for orphan and vulnerable children.
• Empowering terminally ill people.

4. Building partnerships

As in Phase 1, Care for Kids promotes links between well-resourced and less well-resourced churches, enabling them to respond together to the needs of the children and their carers.

5. Ownership

One of the key principles is that the programme is owned by the church itself and two structures are used to insure this:

• Management committee that directly oversees the project.
• Case Committee that determines what care is to be provided to each household.

The Care for Kids Team is involved with setting up, training and supporting these structures. The ultimate aim is that each church will run its programme independently (Phase 3) but remain part of a network that will be used to share ideas and experiences. At present we have two pilot projects running in churches in the greater Cape Town area:

• St. Andrew's - Elisies River
• St. Mary Magdalene - Gugulethu

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