Leaders' Quest

Every young person deserves to rise, thrive and lead a life of purpose and possibility

Why the Safe and Healthy High Schools project

In the Western Cape, 2.5 million young people are growing up in communities that bear the scars of apartheid-era forced removals, economic exclusion and systemic underdevelopment. The Cape Flats remains a visibly under-resourced space – with high levels of violence, poverty and social instability shaping the everyday realities of our youth.

The Safe and Healthy High Schools project aims to contribute to a South Africa with empowered and passionate youth equipped with tools and resources that allow them to make informed and positive life choices. The project focuses on the school ecosystem and the learners within it. It aims to craft safer and healthier spaces for learners – providing access to information and resources that help them navigate their path to adulthood; access to counselling (both individual and group) that assist them with life challenges; access to programmes that provide tools and resources to help them achieve in life – and to support the staff and the parents of the learners to adopt practices that broaden this impact by strengthening relationships and building resilience.

The project aims to support the courage and resilience of the learners, and to help them to have positive life choices and improved life chances so that they are free to thrive.

WHAT WE DO

The Safe and Healthy High Schools project is a three-year pilot that combines our existing Health4Life, Leaders’ Quest, Wellness and Family Affairs programmes into a comprehensive Schools-based initiative. This is being run in eight high schools on the Cape Flats: Fezeka, Heideveld, Intsebenziswano, Modderdam, New Eisleben, Oaklands, Sophumelela and Rocklands High. All of these schools serve learners from under-resourced communities in Cape Town.

The pilot aims to be holistic in nature and speaks to the resilience and health of the school as a unit, while still supporting the leadership and life skills development of the learners within it, and helping them access positive pathways for their futures.

While the project works with Life Choices’ programme teams – Leaders’ Quest, Health4Life, Wellness and Family Affairs – one of its goals is to start to break down the organisational siloes that the have existed between programmes and to get staff to collaborate more closely across programmatic lines, and provide new solutions to challenges.

We’re excited to see how this project will help us to learn and grow our programmes so that we can be more effective and impactful in the future.