Fire Starters
At the beginning of 2012 we started visiting a local high school which really openned their doors to us. Since then we visit 2-3 times a week to meet with the kids during their lunch break. Our time is a mixture of evangelism and discipleship. The hope is to eventually have a trained core who can take over the leadership of the group so that we can move onto another high school to plant another group.
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Misc.
Homework Club
From our birth until November 2008 Joseph Project's flagship ministry was a senior primary homework club. This ran from the Centre every school day and catered for 40-45 children. The purpose was to provide a place where the local children could come and do their homework in a nurturing and supervised environment. This work has been modified under advice from Mary Garner (a highly qualified teacher). The changes have seen a shift in focus from the older senior primary kids to the younger junior primary kids. The thinking here is that by the time most of this community's kids reach senior primary level they have already been failing for 3 years and are already disillusioned with school. So we are now looking at the foundational years seeking to provide the kids with a solid foundation and sense of belief. Many of the children attending are drawn from the Seeds of Hope program.
Carol playing soldier soldier with Gr4-Gr7 kids
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5bob Fairs
There is an astounding practice carried on in our community (tho we believe it to be much more widespread) that involves the scorning of the 5c coin. For some reason most informal and much formal inner city commerce places no value on the 5c coin. So it is regarded as worthless because no vendors accept it. The outworking of this is that the streets are literally littered with dispensed 5c coins. Capitalising on this we run occasional 5 bob(50c) Fairs. We convert the hall into a fairground and have all kinds of prize orientated games and activities going on that the children can pay for with 5c coins. Tho labour intensive it is very popular and somewhere around 100 children attend.
Waterslide at our first and only open air fair.
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Training
Since last year Joseph Project has started low-key youth leaders training. We have been busy with a local college but look to extend that with some enquiries that have come in.
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Hosting
With Johannesburg being the transport hub of Southern Africa and also home to many foreign embassies and consulates with many more just up the road in Pretoria, we are continually called upon to host teams or individuals in transit. Sometimes its for a single night and other times up to a couple of weeks.
We also host several outreach teams a year that are usually starting or rounding off an outreach in SA. With these teams bolstering our numbers we are able to run mini programmes or provide man-power to neighbouring NGO's
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Facilitation
Joseph Project is regularly approached by the corporate sector to facilitate corporate responsibility activities. Some of these we take advantage of personally, but others we refer to our local NGO network.
Another area of facilitation/hosting is for volunteers seeking some kind of social action opportunity. This extends to practicums as well. Here we have placed foreign student teachers seeking practical experience in local schools.
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Admin./Maintenance
With every organisation comes administration and with every fixed asset comes maintenance. Much of the admin. rests on Dylan Atkinson's shoulders and building maintenance too. However Dylan is not an administrator - it sucks the life out of him.
