With the National Child Protection Week (CPW) awareness campaign recently hosted in South Africa, the Laureus Sport for Good Foundation in partnership with Fight with Insight hosted a two day child protection training workshop on 31 May and 1 June at the LIV Village in Durban.
Laureus has already hosted a series of child protection workshops earlier this year in Cape Town and Johannesburg, and hosted the Durban leg last week. The training workshop followed the ‘Courage Child Protection Community Programme Toolkit’, a powerful training kit recently piloted in South Africa.
The ‘Courage Child Protection Community Programme Toolkit’ was developed in partnership with Dee Blackie (BOBI), a consultant to NACSA on special projects and change management initiatives. The objective of this programme is to improve the gate-keeping functions of child protection systems in South Africa, Zambia and Lesotho, ensuring that children without adequate family care or at risk of being abandoned have their rights fulfilled.
Participants at the workshop were provided with various tools to address child protection challengers in a very user friendly manner including: how to identify whether children are being abused and how to develop strategies to resolve the child protection challengers that they encounter.
Luke Lamprecht from Fight with Insight, who led and facilitated the workshop explains the importance of hosting these training workshops, “Laureus has taken the initiative to come down to Durban and train a number of its coaches in their respected social change projects to spread the message in their communities and create a climate where they can motivate and create a number of foot soldiers to protect our children. Coaches are central to the development of children in our country and central to their development is protection.”
The National Child Protection Week (CPW) campaign was launched in 1997 and aims to mobilise all sectors of society to ensure the care and protection of children. The campaign is led by the Minister of Social Development; however it is incumbent on all of us to play a role in protecting children and creating a safe and secure environment for them.
“Our work at Laureus is not only limited to funding projects aligned with the Foundation, but it is also very important that we address key social-economic issues and help these projects deal with these on-going challengers, so that they can go back into the community and try and make a positive impact, and in some small way, help stop the cycle of abuse.” explains Morne du Plessis Chairman of the Laureus Sport for Good Foundation in South Africa.
Among the list of social change projects that participated in the workshop included Peace Players International, Fight with Insight, Indigo Skate Park and the LIV Village. Laureus will host the final leg of it child protection workshop series in the Eastern Cape in July 2016.