2016: What a year!

This year has been a time of exponential growth, tough challenges, our faith been tested and of course, many lives been changed. In 2016 alone we’ve been able to impact the lives of over 5000 individuals on a daily basis. During our journey we’ve seen 3 key areas being highlighted:

---

1. Increasing our areas of influence

A big cause for celebration has been The Domino Foundation moving from being a North Durban NPO to a nationwide NPO.

We’re excited to announce that The Domino Foundation’s areas of influence now include: Waterloo, Oshebni, Amanzimtoti, Inner city Durban and Cape Town. We’ve also continued to strengthen our existing relationships with donors, volunteers, NPOS and governmental departments like the Department of Home Affairs, the Department of Social Development and the National Prosecuting Authority.

---

2.Partnering with local churches

We have loved partnering with other churches to outwork their social justice initiatives.

This year we’ve partnered with Glenridge (Durban Inner City) and The Rock (Umhlanga) through the outworking of the Red light Anti-Human Trafficking programme; Life Changers (Tableview, Cape Town) for the Recycle Swop Shop and Kingsway Church International (Amanzimtoti) to open another sandwich kitchen. As we’ve been able to share our experience, skills, knowledge and feeding expertise we’ve seen an incredible growth in the Amanzimtoti Sandwich Kitchen. In just eight months the kitchen has grown to preparing 660 sandwiches a week – an incredible growth rate!

---

3.Beneficiary Impact

We started the year with four programmes and expanded to seven community transformational initiatives.

Babies’ Homes – We provided a loving, family environment for 15 children in our two transitional homes with 6 babies being adopted into their ‘forever homes’.

Life Skills Programme– We worked with 4 under-resourced primary schools and 726 children on a weekly basis through lessons, one-on-one counselling sessions and after school activities – all aiming to empower learners to make wise life choices.

ECD Programme– We started the year upskilling and transforming 23 crèches into sustainable small businesses and places of active learning and increased to 44 establishments by year-end. Our work in the ECD space ensures that over children are receiving quality foundation-phase development throughout KZN.

Feeding Programme– We opened an additional kitchen to feed the south Durban basin, as well as added an additional 17 establishments (a combination of crèches/kindergartens and primary schools) to our feeding programme across KZN. By the year-end we were feeding a total of 55 establishments and averaging an incredible 98 000 meals a month!

Red light Anti-Human Trafficking – This programme joined Domino in 2016 and in 2017 we look forward to welcoming 8 ladies into our programme where they’ll be assisted, cared for, restored and released.

Recycle Swop Shops – The social justice and environmental programme joined Domino in 2016 with three swop shops operating in the Western Cape.

Bursary Programme – In 2017 the programme will fund 5 students’ tertiary education, giving them the opportunity to build themselves a future through education.

---

Thanks to donors and volunteers, your support has enabled us to continue changing thousands of lives through showing mercy, combatting injustice and empowering individuals throughout our beautiful country of South Africa. If you would like to partner with us for 2017 please let us know.

---

Stories from the crèche: 3rd Quarter 2016

We dream of seeing active learning taking place in crèches around South Africa, where Early Childhood Development centers are not just a baby-sitting service but a place for young children to learn, develop and grow.

For the past three years, we’ve been working tirelessly into 23 crèches in Amaoti through empowering ECD center educators and owners with essential education and enterprise skills. There have been great successes and as we prepare to slowly step away from them we look back at the programme through the eyes of our ECD mentors.

“Firstly, I would like to say it is a privilege and honour to serve the Amaoti community through ECD. Working with little ones gives me the reason to serve God to the fullest. Through The Domino Foundation I’m now a qualified ECD educator with ECD NQF level 4 and am able to assist and mentor ECD teachers in the community to implement active learning in their ECD centers. I have seen a lot of improvement in the crèches we’re working with, with some being registered with the Department of Social Welfare, some in the process of registering. For all the crèches we’re working with I see active learning taking place.”

Zanele Gumede

“ECD in Amaoti has been a very exciting experience for me. It has shown me the potential I have to influence the people around me to take education seriously from a young age. There has been transformation in the teachers and it has improved the children’s skills and learning abilities. Active learning now takes place in many of the crèches and teachers are passionate about teaching learners and developing them in all areas.

In the last year, there have been some exciting developments. Two of our crèches have undergone registration and are well on their way to registration – which has been one of our main objectives. One of the crèches also had a challenge where they had to close down due to another day care operating nearby causing many learners to leave. By God’s grace they decided to operate in a different area and have managed to continue working in their church building and now have a larger amount of school learners.”

Nauleen Luthuli

To continue positively impacting the ECD programme we’re looking for these items:

• learning resources for ages between 0-6 years (skipping ropes, puzzles, play dough, stencils, big lego blocks)
• bright, funky material for our bean bag project (squares of 16cm x 16cm can even pre-cut)
• Stationary (fat kokis, crayons, powder paints, colouring books/ pages, paper, chalk)
• scrap paper collections (children can draw on the back of them)
• nappies, wet wipes, toilet paper
• cleaning materials to wash floors, tables/chairs, dishes etc.

New season, new roles

With a new season comes new leadership. As the Domino Foundation increases its capacity to reach more communities there have been some internal shifts to ensure that the hands who do this work are passionate, skilled and ready to impact lives.

At the beginning of the year Mickey Wilkins stepped down as CEO of the Domino Foundation. After twelve incredible years of leading the non-profit Mickey has now decided to look after the sustainability of Domino and has started Domino Business. As of February 2016 the Domino Foundation welcomed in a new CEO, Richard Mun-Gavin, lead pastor of Cogs Church. Not only does Richard bring a wealth of pastoral experience but his passion for people means he’s more than ready to take Domino into a new season of growth.

Shaun Tait has officially moved into the role of  COO and is overseeing the day to day operations of all the programmes and its staff. Although a tall task Shaun has slid into his role with effort and ease.

After heading up the ECD team since its inception Toni Wilkins has decided to focus her attentions on the Life Skills programme and counselling at the Door of Hope Counselling Centre. The team is now been led by the capable Jessica King, who moved over from donor relations. Jessica is more than qualified for the position and brings her unique learnings from her studies, a Bachelor of Social Science in Organisational Psychology and Industrial Sociology and a Foundation Phase Teaching qualification and is currently Clinical Psychology. Jessica also handles the Domino volunteers.

And in the feeding programme Cathy Whittle has taken over the reigns as Programme Manager. Cathy comes from the cooking industry and has the heaps of experience needed to steer the many Domino feeding projects in the right direction. In case you’ve forgotten, that’s our Sandwich Kitchen, Soup Kitchen and Relief Kitchen. Past Project Manager, Brenda Scheepers has moved onto an exciting venture with Domino Business, which you can read more about here.

ECD Effects 4th Quarter 2015

Early Childhood Development 4th Quarter 2015

“Our children are our greatest treasure. They are our future.”

These great words from Nelson Mandela inspire the Domino Foundation’s Early Childhood Development (ECD) programme, an initiative that hopes to empower unequipped and under-resourced ECD centres to build a stronger foundation for young learners.

One of South Africa’s greatest education challenges is access to quality learning from a young age and even those that do go to foundation phase learning are often scared by the social ills of a broken community. The Amaoti area is marked by poverty and child-headed households and the reality is that what’s happening at home affects the school day – making teaching difficult and requiring teachers to double up as counsellors too.

The Domino Foundation’s ECD team walks alongside 16 ECD centre owners, monitoring the crèches weekly. Educational and enterprise assistance is provided to help meet the nutritional, cognitive, social, behavioural and educational needs of children in their formative years.

Even though the programme has been implemented for a few years it has been a joy to see the suggested improvements being cemented in centres’ routine. All the crèches now teach the same themes and work in tandem together, whereas before the teachers worked in silos isolating themselves from peers. Through the guidance of Unlimited Child and the continued support of the Domino Foundation’s crèche mentors, crèche owners and teachers are empowered to not just care for the children but actually teach them too.

The Sibaya Community Trust have generously funded the programme for the past three years and have been so encouraged by the improvements in the crèches that Domino works into that they are extending funding to cover 15 more crèches in the Waterloo area. Crèche assessments have already been well under way as life skills workers rate the Waterloo crèches on their standing on the registration process, their hygiene, teaching methods and infrastructure.

As a thank you for the teachers’ selfless dedication the Domino Foundation threw an awards ceremony for the crèche owners and teachers complete with holidays hampers and gifts to acknowledge them for what they have done.

The ECD team is excited to unroll what they have set up this year; a season they feel is full of promises and miracles. 2015 has been a year of strengthening and laying the foundations to make an even bigger impact on vulnerable children in the Amaoti community in 2016. As God opens doors into government the team prays for the completion of all the crèche registrations, an accomplishment that brings life and security to the creches and a stepping-stone to a brighter future for our children.

ECD Effects June/July 2015

The Early Childhood Development programme focuses on empowering ECD centre educators and owners with essential education and enterprise skills. Since it’s launch in 2011 the programme has impacted 32 crèches in the Amaoti area in rural KwaZulu-Natal, assisting in making ECD centres sustainable businesses in the process making a lasting economic and educational impact in the community.Sixteen of the creches are funded the Bright Start Programme, a Sibaya Community Trust initiative that invests in education.

We have witnessed many success stories throughout the years, classrooms have been built and beautified, owners have learnt business and teaching skills and kids have quality classes. To ensure that the little learners can absorb the quality education they’re fed nutritious meals everyday through the Domino Foundation’s feeding programme.

Primrose Gcabashe is the crèche owners of Thembelihle Crèche and is exceptionally proud of her new crèche built through the funds available through the programme. She believes the programme has empowered her run to an effective business as well as provide quality education saying, “I don’t feel so alone, I feel supported and encouraged and now I have a beautiful crèchethat I can teach the children in.”

ECD Effects May

With a vision to improve the quality of learning and preparation for school readiness our Early Childhood Development (ECD) centres benefit vulnerable children.

An exciting development has been the addition of a research and evaluation component to the feeding of our crèches. All of the children from our crèches receive highly nutritious JAM SA porridge and recently underwent a nutritional assessment by the NPO to assess whether they’re underweight or overweight. The assessment measured the weight, height and upper arm width and will help create a baseline assessment to compare from in six months time to see if there has been any improvement.

The 50 gram portion of JAM porridge provides children with 75% of their daily micro-nutrient requirements. The porridge, known as CSS+ (Corn Soya Sugar Blend) consists of 65% corn, 25% soya, 10% sugar and fortified with micro- and macro-nutrients.

Our ECD programme also partners with The Unlimited Child, an NPO that provides educational toys, training and on-going support to caregivers. Our crèche owners have thoroughly enjoyed and benefited from their training with The Unlimited Child and NELRU and the changes have been seen in the classrooms. Children are no longer just sitting on the floor but engaging with their learning environment- painting, playing with play dough and playing with theme tables.

Why Early Childhood Development is essential for us all

While early childhood development may seem like an issue for just tots, parents and preschool teachers the surprising reality is that it actually affects us all. Groundbreaking research from the Heckman Equation shows how investing in a child’s education foundation directly influences the economy of a country and it’s health and social results. Our ECD programme reaches 26 ECD centres and strives to provide proper support, resources and infrastructure to teachers and toddlers; ensuring we really do create a brighter South Africa for all.

Most of our ECD children come from disadvantaged families where parents are absent or busy, extra learning resources are few, there’s little proper nutrition and the children are battling against many other social ills.James J. Heckman points out that these disadvantages actually cripple kids later on in life, decreasing their skills and productivity and pushing up the country’s cost of social and health problems.

Heckman says, “A critical time to shape productivity is from birth to age five, when the brain develops rapidly to build the foundation of cognitive and character skills necessary for success in school, health, career and life. Early childhood education fosters cognitive skills along with attentiveness, motivation, self-control and sociability—the character skills that turn knowledge into know-how and people into productive citizens.”

Our ECD schools aim to create the best stimulating learning environment we can possibly provide. We have ongoing training for the crèche owners ensuring they are capable of developing cognitive, social and character skills in our little kiddies. We also partner with local experts in the education sphere, building on from their knowledge and tools to make sure our kids are ready for ‘big school’ and later on, the big wide world.

The end result is a generation that is skilled, productive and healthy and are fully capable of contributing positively in society!

ECD Effects Jan/Feb 2015

After a busy and successful 2014 the Early Childhood Development Project started the new year off by all 36 creche owners joining together to plan and prepare for 2015.

ECD will be working quite closely with another Durban based NPO in 2015, The Unlimited Child, to try plan and roll out a common set of themes for all the creche owners to follow in their classrooms. At the moment each creche is doing their own theme, but by streamlining themes exciting and necessary resources can be gathered, pooled and prepared.

The field workers are currently completing their NELRU NQF level 4 training, a year long courses upskilling them and enabling them to impart more knowledge to the creche owners they regularly visit who in turn impacts hundreds of little children.

A big ECD dream for 2015 is match last year’s achievement of registering three creches with the government. The process is rather lengthy and complicated but once registered creches can receive grant money for each child, a huge benefit for both creche owner and child! The creches also become a small business, one of the main pillars the ECD programme is trying to achieve.

The Domino Christmas Story

This Christmas we wanted to spread the festive joy by placing a toy in the hand of as many underprivileged children as possible in the Amaoti community. On the 28th of November we organised an event to gather presents together so that we could make this Christmas a special one for the hundreds of kids who are in a creche on our ECD programme.

The day was an incredible, all-round success with businesses such as Megapile, Donald Insurance Brokers, Nexia International, Platinum Consulting and Vopac coming in to wrap hundreds of presents.

JAM also made a donation that allowed every child to receive a pair of shoes and a facecloth with their toy. An abundance of toys also allowed us to distribute excess to other charities.

1442 presents were individually wrapped and sent out to 1442 smiling faces in Amaoti. Thank you to every person who either donated or wrapped these gifts , your contribution has truly made a difference in the lives of so many.

The Wrapping & Packing:

 

 

The Distribution:

 

The Domino Christmas Story

This Christmas, join in The Domino Christmas Story
and spread the festive joy!

Help package Christmas ‘loveboxes’ for vulnerable children in the Amaoti township.

We work with 32 crèches on our ECD programme and benefit over 1000 children on a daily basis.
We are wanting to place a Christmas present
into the hands of each of these children on
Christmas day to share the love and make a difference
in the lives of these little ones.

There are 3 easy steps to contribute to this awesome drive:

  2 options:

1. Grab your friends & Colleagues, Download Santa’s Christmas Parcel List (valued at R150ea, below!) and get shopping for all the items for your chosen age group ‘Lovebox’!

2. Donate R150 to The Domino Foundation for us to put together‘ Loveboxes’ for the children!

 

(Booking of time slots essential!)Bring your gifts, wrapping paper, sellotape and Christmas cards to 125 Adelaide Tambo Drive, Durban North On Thursday 27 November or Friday 28 November And join in the packing festivities with us!

 

 

Bring your Christmas Parcels and place them under the Domino Christmas tree at 125 Adelaide Tambo Drive on Thursday 27 Nov & Friday 28 November and join us for the “Giving light to hope Ceremony” at 19h00 on Friday. We will deliver Christmas parcels during the 1st week of December 2014 before crèches close for the holidays.

 

 

Here are the Santa Christmas Parcel Wishlists:

 

To read more about this awesome day visit our website: www.domino.org.za/dominochristmas.htm