Starting Chance™ Overview
The Starting Chance™ Campaign is about winning the future by creating opportunity – there is no shortage of ability when you look into the eyes of children in the poor communities around Cape Town. It is opportunity they lack. - Dr. Ian Corbett
The aim of the Starting Chance™ Campaign is to radically accelerate access to quality Early Childhood Development programmes in the poverty-stricken communities in and around Cape Town. The vision is to put in place 30 sustainable Early Childhood Centres of Excellence by 2017. The goal will be for each centre to become a nodal point from which further upliftment of ECD facilities and service provision can be driven, giving a Starting Chance™ to some 15000 children a year.
Achievement of this goal will require an integrated approach that delivers much needed physical infrastructure in parallel with training and developing principals, teachers, and assistants to build the skills and capability to sustainably operate the centres.
The Starting Chance™ campaign is gathering momentum and we intend to have an up-scaled SASDI team in place to begin executing the project plan from January 2012. This innovative project will be a platform to assist in the development of tertiary-level students across a variety of professions from architecture and engineering to marketing and education.
Starting in Mfuleni
The first nodal point will be in the township of Mfuleni, where SASDI completed the construction of the Mfuleni Centre for Early Childhood Development in 2011 in partnership with the City of Cape Town, Stichting Mzamomhle and the Mellon Housing Initiative. A research programme during the first semester of 2011 developed a framework for training and developing principals, teachers and assistants. The targeted date for implementation is the first term of 2010, with up to 5 Mfuleni ECD providers participating.
Shack to Chic
The Ekukhanyeni Project will transform the facilities at Mama Amelia’s Sakhumzi Centre in Mfuleni. The goal is to develop a multi-purpose Early Childhood Centre with a small village-style foster care facility and children’s clinic on-site. The ECD facility on the site will be the first "Shack to Chic" makeover to improve the learning environment and create a base in which to train and develop an effective education team.
Starting ChanceTM Environmental Outings
It is a sad fact that many children in townships close to Cape Town seldom experience the metropolitan area’s natural beauty. With the help of Wings of Support, Cape for Kids, a SASDI partner, is providing low-cost environmental outings to pre-schools in Mfuleni and Hout Bay. The outings are coupled with a training and development programme for educators in order to enhance the value of the experience. Collaborating with projects like this will play an integral part in the Starting Chance™ Campaign’s overall mission of transforming ECD in Cape Town.