Khululeka
Children in Cape Town

The number o. Khululeka Grief Support is a Non-Profit Organisation that provides training on how to recognise and support bereaved children and youth.

Our vision is a South Africa where all grieving children and adolescents have access to support and opportunities for healing. Our mission is to build the resilience of children, adolescents and their caregivers by equipping them with tools to process their experiences of loss and death. Through a holistic approach, we aim to create responsive and compassionate environments that enable grieving children to heal. Khululeka Grief Support is a Non-Profit Organisation based in Cape Town. Our goal is to create a supportive environment to help children deal with their grief and loss. We work mainly among children and community child care workers in poor communities, and also provide support to teachers, nurses, social workers and other professionals working with children. These women collectively brought their experiences from social work, child psychology, palliative care, community child care work, nursing and education. They developed bereavement training in response to the needs of caregivers and teachers caring for and working with children who had suffered from the death of a parent or sometimes multiple family members through HIV and AIDS. Since our founding Khululeka has run bereavement training workshops for people from over 150 government, non-government and non-profit organisations. We have worked across multiple sectors in various provinces, e.g. special needs teachers in the Free State, child carers in a rural area in KwaZulu-Natal, and social workers, community based child workers, nurses, and pre-school teachers in the Western Cape. We provide post-workshop mentoring to caregivers we have trained. We have also continued to run peer support groups for bereaved children. In terms of our organisational development, Khululeka has received support from the Community Development Resource Association and independent organisational development practitioner, Anne Heslop. This has ensured sustained, strategic and sustainable organisational development over the last few years. Khululeka are also grateful for the pro bono legal expertise of Patrick Cox. Just completed Singing to the Lions training on working with children who have experienced violence and abuse.