Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) including poverty, loss, exposure to violence and abuse have a negative impact on children’s ability to learn.
“We illustrate this with a drawing of a learner carrying a backpack filled with bricks that weigh them down,” says Community Keepers’ Reece Carstens. “When a child has a safe space and safe person, they are able to unpack those bricks and free themselves up to concentrate in school and to thrive.”
Community Keepers has been quietly getting on with the job of setting up counselling rooms on school grounds and offering free services to the poorest communities. Their reach was confined to a small pocket of the Western Cape notoriously known as having the highest child murder rate in the country. They could only do so much until, inspired by the likes of Prof Vikram Patel (Harvard University, USA), they started training up local community members to work alongside their social workers and counsellors.
Over the past 2 years, Community Keepers in partnership with National Treasury’s Jobs, has followed the “Build Back Better MAC advisory recommendation (May 2022) to introduce ‘the implementation of non-professional interventions within a framework of psychological first aid. Such interventions involve training community members to identify mental health signs and symptoms, they are cost-effective and lend themselves to task-shifting models.’
The idea is to work with schools to build a culture of wellbeing where everyone feels a sense of belonging and everyone can thrive. The focus is on the learners who enrol for anchoring life skill workshops (where participants build a toolbox of wellbeing techniques), or therapy (depending on their need). This same service then also ripples out to the educators, school staff and parents/guardians – who learn the same life skills such as active listening, setting healthy boundaries, breathing techniques to calm anxiety.
“We are a youth led organisation and the needs filter from bottom up. The learners describe their challenges and we respond with interventions. Likewise, we hold round table think tanks with the school management and create a bespoke plan to address their unique and most pressing needs. Examples could be as varied as managing a classroom environment, addressing self-harm, substance use and abuse. Our school-based teams have guidelines and a library of resources but also a lot of freedom to be effective.” continues Carstens.
We now come full circle, where school leavers can remain in their community, be trained in mental health first aid and deliver life changing services. They are taught very clear scope of practice and call on the registered professional who focuses on case load and therapeutic interventions.
Currently partnering with 89 partner schools (primary and high) across South Africa and impacting the lives of 77 500 learners and their care givers each year, Community Keepers is shattering the frightening statistic that, in public school, each child competes with 23000 others in a queue for a social worker.
The model has been developed over 15 years and opening 44 new sites in July last year has proved that it is ready to scale and be embedded into the system. The service is fairly unique in that it intersects Health, Education, Social Development as well as Safety and Security and now job creation too.
South Africans are focussed on investing in literacy and numeracy – but emotional literacy must not be forgotten. It could be the barrier that unlocks learner potential. Wellbeing is described as the state where individuals realise their own potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life work productively and fruitfully contribute to their community. And that is exactly what we need.
ends…
MEDIA ENQURIES:
Reece Carstens, New Business Development, reece@communitykeepers.org 076 099 9478
Community Keepers is an NPO, established in 2008, concerned with the mental health and wellbeing of leaners and school communities. They establish themselves on school premises and through their c.a.r.e. model offer a whole-school approach. Their goal is to be in 100 schools by 2025 and they currently partner with 89 schools serving low-income communities across the Western Cape, Eastern Cape and Gauteng.
The source document for the 1:23 000 statistic on our last page is :
Note: WCED (Western Cape Education Department) has recently announced that at the start of 2025 they will have cut the number of teaching posts. Community Keepers anticipates that they will see an increased need for their services due to:
- Uncertainty which could lead to increased levels of anxiety for educators and parents/guardians which, in turn, impacts learners
- The possibility of increased class size, which could impact wellbeing
- The possible increase in workload, which could impact school staff wellbeing
Community Keepers proposes that the training up of Classroom Assistants in Mental Health First Aid, could have a positive impact on all school communities. The CK material is tried and trusted as evidenced in the Jobs Fund project and recommendations.
