The "New Life" Centre

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

The "New Life" Centre

The Ubomi Obutsha (New Life) Centre is a community development project, administered by CCMP, directly impacting the lives of 500-600 orphaned and vulnerable children (OVC's) from the surrounding community each month with over 2000 children being directly impacted each year. The Centre also serves as a gateway into the broader community for volunteers coming from the outside to work in community schools, etc.

The Centre was origionally a "planted" mission but has been developed over the past few years into a community development project run by the community itself and will soon be ready to be registerd as a Non Profit Organisation (NPO) in it's own right!

The Centre's primary aim is to identify, assist and care for the many children living in high risk situations within the community and also to help these children's care givers to stabilise their living conditions to give their children a better chance in life.

This is done through three areas of activities:

Open Youth Programs, like a Sunday school, youth groups, soup kitchens, access to a resource centre for school work, etc, allow community children to participate in constructive activities and receive the kind of valuable input and guidance in life many of us might take for granted but is sorely lacking in most of their lives.
From the open youth programs, children who may need more focused care are identified. Home visits, assessments and reviews are done after which more specific High Risk OVC Interventions are put to work to help meet their specific needs. These may include food and clothing parcels,other basic needs in the home, assistance with school needs, referals through our network of partners to health, social, legal and governmental departments, basic counseling and an invitation for toddlers in these homes to attend a daily Educare program at the Centre to better prepare them for formal schooling.
Adult Support Programs focus on assisting the care givers of these children to find more purpose and meaning in their own lives and developing the personal skills and attributes needed to provide their children with a more stable environment in which to develop and grow. In addition to helping meet basic needs in their homes, these programs include working in a food garden, a weekly Bible study, a weekly topical workshop and a weekly world-view enrichment activity.

Many of the community volunteers working from the Centre themselves originally came to the Centre for assistance! Having got their lives back on a level they are now a part of our team identifying and reaching out to the many suffering children arround them. Every year we welcome more community volunteers, who have come through the food garden, onto the team and see this as a reflection of the success of our approach to the work we do.

Being our largest project, most of the updates on our main page will inevitably come from the daily activities of the Centre and the volunteers who work from there.

For more detailed information, download the Ubomi Obutsha Centre Profile.

Statement of Purpose

In our community there are many children, from infants to those about to become adults, who are in danger of losing, or have already lost, their care givers to diseases such as HIV/AIDS, TB and other factors like substance abuse, physical abuse, crime, irresponsibility, a lack of education, etc. which are related to the general poverty of the people. These children are often not properly cared for or nurtured and so are likely to grow up to live lives of dependence on others to meet even their most basic needs.

We choose not to sit by and watch as this happens, but rather choose to take these children as our own and to work together within the community to fill the gaps in their lives where we can. We want to see the children of our community grow up to be successful and live meaningful, God honouring, self supporting and productive lives for the good of not only this community, but for the greater good of our city and country as a whole.

We recognise through experience that only limited success can be realised by working with only niche groups within the community, and so our approach is to address the problem of orphaned and vulnerable children (OVC’s) in our community in a more inclusive way by affecting their environment as well as their person.

To this end, we work towards the following:

Our Core Values

As a project of Combined Christian Ministries to the Poor, managed by members of the community surrounding the Ubomi Obutsha Centre, these values are at the core of our work:

1. We value the restoring of people to a relationship with God through the person of Jesus Christ.

2. We value the children of our community and their future.

3. We value the physical, emotional and spiritual health of the people in our community.

4. We value the importance of education.

5. We value dedication and a sense of responsibility.

6. We value confidentiality.

7. We value respect for all people of all ages and all backgrounds.

8. We value love that expresses itself through these values.

9. We value each other as part of a team.

Because we value these things, we subscribe to the following:

Objectives

1. To build working relationships between community members and community institutions that identify with this purpose and would volunteer to be a part of it.

2. To proactively identify children at risk by interacting with those children and adults attending our Centre Programs and through referrals from within the community.

3. Assess households where possible to decide the best course of action to be taken for individual needs.

4. Provide programs that will instil in these children the internal abilities of character that will ultimately enable them to rise above their situations.

5. Provide food and clothing directly to those children whose care givers are grossly inattentive to or abusive of their needs.

6. Provide physical resources for these children that will help them to achieve success in their schooling.

7. Liaise with social workers, police, clinics, schools, etc to intervene where we feel there is little that we can do to assist the current circumstances within a household.

8. Assist the care givers in OVC households to stabilise their situations through educational, motivational, and socially developmental programs and by providing towards the nutritional and physical needs of the household where possible to ensure that the input given to their children does not lose its impact.

9. Welcome and diligently work with any assistance offered to us from outside our community.

10. Create opportunities for volunteers to grow in their abilities through regular training and encouraging of proactive participation.