Lifeskills for 2,587 Children in South Africa

Dear Friends and partners,

This project report is a submission to GlobalGiving's 2017 Fail Forward Contest, where organizations are asked to share a story of when they tried something new that didn't go as planned and how we learned from it.

So I hope you enjoy our fail it forward story.

When Keep The Dream196 started, we decided clearly to work with children aged 7-11 and 12-18yrs. It was almost written in stone, what we didn't realise was how successful we were going to be. It didn't take too long before we had 6year olds, 5year olds, 4 and 3year olds wanting to join our program.

You might think this is a good thing however, it wasn't. We would refuse the young ones entry to the program because many of the games and activities were especially for older children and personally I was concerned that these little ones would get hurt by the older ones passion for winning games or being involved in more grown up activities. It would break my heart going to a group and seeing the little ones, often younger siblings to our kids, sitting outside crying to come in and play.

We were not able to keep to our original program definitions. It was an issue because working with this age group requires more skills and more patience and more volunteers. The answer came from the older siblings, they would assist their younger brothers or sisters, which was a wonderful practical answer.

Unfortunately it doesn't stop there!

When we started seeing children age out of the program we then had 18yr olds that wanted to stay in the program.......this was unexpected and again unplanned for. We had no idea the program would be so appreciated. We had to come up with an alternative for the young adults. This was relatively easy in that there is a 3rd branch called Rovers in scouting which have a program already in place however, it failed epically because the youth were unable to keep the rover crews operating on their own, without adult support. Many were in matric or had moved on to Gauteng Province for further studies. Every school holidays we would have a massive influx of young adults wanting to become involved in the program again.

We had no answers, it was difficult as the youth were wanting to be actively involved but our resources wouldn't stretch to include them.

We asked the youth about a way forward, they brainstormed and came up with a series of suggestions that we could implement and then the rovers could select a suggestion or series of suggestions to meet their needs. This would require minimal input from us. Some of the youth even decided to be trained as adult leaders to give back to their communities.

I think what we learnt from this series of fails was that we didn't ever think that what we were doing would be so well received, we thought we would struggle to find children to get involved, we were poorly prepared and had no back up plan for the huge blow out. Now when we go to a new village we are prepared for blow out success as well as slow development.

Another more important thing we learnt was that we (Keep The Dream196 staff) don't have to have all the answers. When it comes to do with children, about children, ask children. We learnt early in the beginning days to engage with them for their answers to their problems and ours. By taking ownership of the issues they were able to come up with solutions that were not imposed upon them and therefore readily embraced by them.

This might be logical to all of you however in the real world when you are balancing organizational requirements, programmatic requirements and resource allocation one can loose sight of what is logical when under pressure and just focus on the issue. We initially went from 60children to 1,100 in a matter of a month. We were ill prepared. We could have crippled our program before we even started.

What we also learnt was start small, which we did. We started with 13 kids, 6months later we had 60 kids. Then we trained 50 leaders expecting perhaps 200 more kids but 1,100 was just unbelievable. What saved us was that we were determined to stay in one geographical area so that transport, monitoring and evaluation was contained.

Thank you for all your support over the years. It is much appreciated. We continue to grow and develop with your support

Louise

ps Harry is one of our original young leaders. He was one of the 1,100 blow out kids who decided to stay on in the program as a Rover and Adult leader. Here he is receive a commendation for his role in developing his troop. Young leaders of the future. It is so exciting.