Auntie is a ‘non profit’ organisation, set up on behalf of the Childcare Sector in the UK and Ireland, that promotes human and social development - investing in projects in Africa to improve the lives of the most vulnerable children living in extreme poverty - through self sufficiency (and not dependency!)
At the same time Auntie will run projects in these communities that create economic self sufficiency, and will introduce a programme to ‘twin’ crèches in South Africa with nurseries in the UK and Ireland – bringing practitioners and children from both continents closer together.
more about auntie's Core Aims…
We aim to engage young people involved in childcare in our work in South Africa, providing opportunities to be directly involved in our projects there, to learn from them and to teach in them, and in doing so, create fantastic opportunities for personal development and ‘life changing’ experiences.
We aim to create positive relationships between nurseries in the UK and crèches in South Africa, and relationships between individuals sponsoring children in South Africa and the recipients of that support. And we aim to involve the children in both countries.
Research into early childhood development shows that a good start in life is critical to the physical, intellectual and emotional development of children and that poverty in early childhood can become a handicap for life. Rather than simply provide ‘charitable aid’ to support township communities’ childcare needs (which would leave these communities with an ongoing dependency), we have created a model that will become self financing and therefore sustainable - and can be replicated and ‘rolled out’. Our plan is therefore to build on the pre-school care and education delivered via nurseries, by continuing to support these children through their formal education and into meaningful employment, providing positive role models and mentoring via ‘wraparound’ afterschool clubs, and help with the development of life skills and vocational training. In order to make this affordable, we believe that each project must become self financing.
In summary, our objectives are:
to create an extremely high level of engagement of a wide network of fundraisers via the Childcare Sector in the UK and Ireland, with a strong sense of purpose and community to invest funds raised directly to ensure that every penny raised goes into these projects (with any other costs covered by Gift Aid) to provide unprecedented opportunity for UK child carers to gain valuable experience in the communities we help to build, to learn from them and share experiences while improving the quality of childcare in South Africa to establish our project model, resourcing and running our nurseries/crèches and other programmes efficiently to ensure that the children and young people in the communities we serve are safe, fed, attend crèche or school, avoid the social, moral and health dangers currently faced (alcoholism, drugs, HIV/AIDS, violent and sexual crime, and child prostitution) and emerge with an education, skills for life, employment and a positive future and to evolve a successful model, raise sufficient funds to be able to roll it out widely, and ensure that our projects are sustainable and ‘owned’ by the local communities they serve.
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