We’ve had such amazing success with both our student and community gardens, providing endless teaching opportunities and hands-on experience in a sustainable business operation, while allowing us to sell our vegetables locally to generate income and alleviate food shortages.

But why stop at vegetables? You may remember the celebrated arrival of a few feathered females in March — egg-laying hens! 

While the sale of eggs is adding to our income, the hens also offer our staff unique opportunities to teach about ecosystems, biology, environmentalism, and economics. 

So when we had the chance to acquire some goats and ducks, we jumped at the chance. Thanda’s Agriculture program is one of our most popular programs, and this is thanks to our remarkable staff and their innovative lessons about sustainability, responsibility, and economic independence–all taught in Thanda’s ever-growing vegetable gardens. 

Throughout August and September, we’ll be asking for your help with some exciting changes on site to help us improve our farming education programs and keep this momentum going! We also have our eye on some pigs….

Ready to give now? Visit our donation page to get started.

Make sure Thanda’s littlest ones have the chance to dream big by giving to the Primary Education Programs. We urgently need your help to fund a year of programming for 175 children. That’s $150 per child.

Thanda’s after-school programming offers a dynamic, engaging curriculum of lessons and activities designed to help children develop reading and math skills, creativity, and problem-solving abilities.

Like many in rural South Africa, the 175 children who depend on our Primary Education Programs are vulnerable to the devastating effects of the AIDS epidemic and chronic poverty. Thanda provides a safe space for these children, and teachers who offer much-needed emotional support.

Empowering children with a sense of self-worth, belonging, and a life-long love of learning, the children in the Primary Education Programs are building the foundation for a better life.

A little goes a long way at Thanda; every 42 cents promises a child one more day of education, security, and support. Our youngest students need you. To give today, click here.

Thanks to a group of truly generous volunteers, Thanda’s library is ready to live and lend! We’re excited to open the first library in the Hibberdene community; access to reading materials and space to study promotes learning. Kids who participate in Thanda read up to 4 more books per month.

We are developing our agriculture program: this year we built a chicken house + coop as well as a chicken tractor so students learn about sustainable farming methods!

Thanda seeks to empower local youth through skill-building and entrepreneurship. Our Next Steps program has brought on former student Siya (middle) to teach sewing!

We’ve started cycling lessons: bicycles are a great mode of transport in rural areas, and they’re a lot of fun!

We also have our very own borehole on the way!

Thanks to you, Thanda has accomplished so much this year!  We’ve become an even more crucial source of support for the orphans and vulnerable children in rural KwaZulu-Natal. 

This year alone: 

We’ve provided 1,650 after-school lessons and 55,000 meals. 

We’ve added nurseries and chickens to our Agriculture programmes.  50% of Thanda high school students have started their own vegetable gardens at home. 

 We’ve started the Next Steps Programme to provide high school grads with sewing, gardening, computer, and bicycle repair skills to build viable local businesses.

We opened the first library in the municipality!  Within 3 months of its opening, Thanda children were reading 4 more books per month than they had been. 

Thank you for helping to change the lives of hundreds of orphans and vulnerable children in 2012. We wish you and your family a warm holiday season and a healthy, happy new year. We’re looking forward to seeing what we will accomplish together in 2013! Ready to get started? Click here.

Love,

Angela and Tyler

This holiday season, we’d like to share one of the many extraordinary stories of help and hope that were made possible by Thanda.  Meet Noluthando.

When Noluthando was just 3-months-old, she was badly injured in a fire. Her left hand was disfigured and she lost both of her legs. Her whole life, she had been confined to a wheelchair that barely met her needs. Because her one hand is disfigured, she had little control over her chair, so if no one was available to help her, she was at the mercy of the hilly, uneven ground around her home. Noluthando often ended up injuring herself simply trying to leave her hut. Her father left the family when she became disabled and they survive on her mother’s earnings from selling sweets outside the local school. Any better solutions for this smiling, outgoing girl were beyond their means.

Noluthando is very bright, but her lack of mobility meant that she had to attend a special needs school, even though she does not have any learning disabilities. All Noluthando wanted was to be able to move around freely, to be safe and independent so she could attend the local school.  

A local support group, the Masisizane Disabled Support Group, brought the girl’s case to Thanda’s attention. Today, thanks to the help of the South African Airports Company physiotherapists and Thanda, Noluthando has artificial legs and is able to walk for the first time in her life!

Raah, Thanda’s manager, asked her how life had changed since she received her legs.  “It is better than before,” she said. “Now I can walk outside, which is something I was not able to do before. Things have changed enormously at school. Before I had to ask my young school mates to help push me because I was always in a wheel chair, and sometimes they didn’t want to help. They used to say that they were tired and I was a burden to their shoulders.”

Noluthando is doing exceptionally well in grade 5 at school. When Raah visited her, she shared her school report card with him. She has a 91% in economic and management sciences, and 90% in mathematics. Her mother proudly reported that when Noluthando is at home, she “spends almost the entire day reading books.”

“Whatever challenges I am facing, I would like to thank Thanda and the South African Airports Company for their help and support,” Noluthando’s mother told Raah. “There are many people who have come here and promised to help and they never come back.  It had been more than ten years waiting for them to come back. It did not even take a year to get help from you and I am very thankful for that.”

There are so many children like Noluthando who need your help.  When you give to Thanda, you enable projects like this one.  Join us in making life-changing differences for those who need it most and give to Thanda this holiday season. 

Kids at Thanda enjoy each others’ talents.

One of the most exciting things about our new Community Center and Library is that we now have a place to host events for the local community. With just a used sound system, an enthusiastic staff, and lots of music, a Friday afternoon becomes an opportunity to bring people together with dancing, poems, games and prizes. Thanda kids have a chance to share new skills and talents with friends and classmates. What strikes me each time is the sense of ownership amongst the kids—they see Thanda as their space, their home, and these events are their chance to shine for one another. I’m the Director at Thanda, but as the music blares, I almost feel like a teenager again, just hanging out.  And as the afternoon progresses, kids who are unfamiliar with Thanda start to blend in with the kids in our programs and we get a momentary look at what it will be like once we get the chance to expand.

A student performs at Thanda.

One of our more memorable events was held in April, on Freedom Day, when South Africans celebrate the first free elections.  On that day in 1994, people of all races were recognized as full citizens and allowed to vote. It has been 18 years since those first elections and it is hard to believe so much time has passed. I remember being a child, watching incredibly long lines of voters standing all day to cast their votes—91% of South Africans voted that day.

Long lines on election day, 1994.

Avoiding the almost-customary outbreak of violence, 1994 was a magical time for everyone in South Africa. As a child, I remember it was time filled with dreams of a better future. There are days when I am astonished and grateful for the progress South Africa has made.  Then there are days when the lack of progress is what gets me out of bed and into the truck to visit Thanda—because there is so much work that is yet to be done.  Where we stand today depends primarily on who you talk to, but it is obvious that despite advances, we have a long way to go until everyone is truly free, until everyone has opportunities to break the cycle of chronic poverty. To some, it may be a bit of a leap, but with the loud house music blaring from our Community Center and Library, I know we’re taking steps towards creating hope, pride, and those opportunities every day.

On my computer desktop, I keep two clocks—one set to Eastern Standard Time, the other set to South Africa time.  I can do the math, but I like to look at the second clock and imagine what Angela and the staff at Thanda are up to on the other side of the world.

As Thanda’s new Director of Development for the US, my job is to bring Thanda to those of you who live here, in America.  In writing and in person, I want to bring to life the numerous ways what you are supporting is truly special.

Even just a few weeks on the job, I can already lay out a million examples to prove just that, examples that illustrate the progress and success happening on so many levels at Thanda, from the principles that guide the organization to stories of individual children and staff members, to the tangible changes Thanda has produced in the community in its short four-year history.  But I’ll save them for another time.  For now, I just want to communicate one idea: when you give to Thanda, you are giving to a solution.

Let me explain.

Before I decided to join the nonprofit world, I volunteered for Thanda—offering thoughts on web site re-designs, throwing Thanda Zulu jewelry parties, helping at Thanda functions in NYC.  Like most of you, I imagine, I got involved with Thanda because of Angela.  I’ve known Ang since I was 14 when we were high school chums.  She’s a force of nature, and I so believed in her and her desire to see Thanda succeed, that I happily helped out however and whenever I could.

Angela, Me, and Holly Buchanan at a Thanda Fundraiser in 2010

The more I did for Ang, the more I learned about Thanda, and the more I realized that it was unlike any other nonprofit I had ever encountered. With terrific research and understanding, Ang and Tyler had designed and were beginning to execute a plan that would help devastated communities heal themselves and rise above the destruction of HIV/AIDS and poverty, permanently. When I had helped with fundraisers and events, I was supporting lasting change, an end to a problem, in other words, a solution.

When I decided to make the leap to the nonprofit world, I went looking for other Thandas—organizations with models of lasting change.  There aren’t as many as you’d think there’d be in these days of social entrepreneurship and micro-finance and new wave philanthropy.  So I was thrilled to join Ang and Thanda. After all, they’d been my compass all along. And it has felt like coming home.

Angela, Me, my Husband Greg, and Tyler outside Thanda’s Library and Community Center

You may have never stepped inside the cold damp of a cement and thatch hut in rural South Africa.  Until my recent trip to South Africa, I hadn’t either.  Inside, I found a small army of children, all under the age of 12 and all under the care of one elderly woman, bent with age.  There was no electricity and certainly no plumbing, and one double bed for everyone.  When it was time to go and everyone came out into the light to say goodbye, it was clear it wasn’t the shadows, but that everyone’s clothes were filthy with dust.  The children all kept the same posture when I waved to them—shoulders hunched, eyes low, unfixed.  Their little bodies were working so hard to survive that they couldn’t even engage me on this most basic level.

The children who are a part of Thanda’s programs are vibrant.  They can’t keep still, they are so excited to get inside Thanda’s gates for Thanda After-School and see the staff, the library, to play with each other.  There is constant noise, warmth and energy in that building.  It is the exact opposite of life in those huts.

Making sure we play with every toy in the Children’s Corner.

What happens at Thanda are the first steps toward long term change for this community and for all the other communities Thanda is going to reach with its programs and curriculum.  I feel thankful, every day, to be a part of it, even all the way over here in Brooklyn.  And if you are reading this blog post, you are a part of it, too—and thank you for helping us come this far.  I can’t wait to meet you in person and talk about Thanda with you soon.

-Abigail Holstein

That’s right.  11.6 million–the number of children in South Africa living in households below the poverty line, 1.9 million of whom have already been orphaned by AIDS. It’s such an impossibly high number, how could anyone even begin to think about making sure all of those children are fed, that they have a safe place to live, that they stay in school, that they are thriving?

At Thanda, we think about it because we understand these children are more likely to become pregnant as teenagers, are more likely contract and spread HIV/AIDS, are more likely to suffer from malnutrition, more likely to drop out of school, than those who come from households with more.  We work with a small portion of these millions everyday at Thanda After-School.

And we’ve learned these children need more than just a school to go to or to be trained in a skill to find a job. Surviving in extreme poverty often without significant adult guidance or support, these children need a reason to stay in school, a reason to pursue a skill. They need a reason to believe and to hope that there is a future for them. We give them those reasons in the form of encouragement, confidence, self-respect and respect for others.

They also need the skills and resources that they never had a chance to develop: problem-solving, creative thinking, cooperation and collaboration, resourcefulness and the ability to recognize opportunity.  These give them a fighting chance against the challenges brought on their communities by poverty and HIV/AIDS.

This knowledge has shaped the model of support that we use at Thanda After-School—and now, we are ready to share our work.

Right now, I’m working with our staff to translate our four years  of program development and on-the-ground work into a blueprint that we will give to neighboring schools, programs, community centers and care facilities so they can give the Thanda After-School experience to the children under their care.

Many organizations are starting to offer meals and supervision after-school, but they lack the programs to assist children in the comprehensive way Thanda After-School does.

We’re working to write lesson plans that can be used directly with groups of kids to help them overcome traumas endured and develop in an encouraging and respectful environment.

Sharing our model of support means we are indirectly reaching thousands more children—bettering the odds that one day, all 11.6 million might just get the care they need.