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Engaging with key stakeholders is an essential part of any transition and must be handled with tact and wisdom. Located in South Africa, the organization Beautiful Gate began its ministry to protect street children and later grew to provide residential programs for children in need. Yet, as they began to learn more about the needs of children in families, they decided to shift away from residential care and expand their services to include the families of the children they served.
As Beautiful Gate broadened and prioritized the role of families, they communicated family strengthening as a…
Beautiful Gate was established in 1994 by a Dutch missionary couple who simply desired to do what was “just, good, and right” for children. It began as a children’s home for children living on the streets in the suburb of Muizenberg in Cape Town, South Africa. In 1999, at the request of the government, a second location was opened in the neighboring township of Crossroads as a hospice for children dying of HIV/AIDS. The hospice eventually moved to a new site in the Lower Crossroads area in 2004. The larger site made possible additional community services, including a medical clinic, community…
These presentations from Know-How Center Bulgaria, Children and Family Initiative, and Changing the Way We Care, were delivered during the September 30, 2021, workshop of the Care Measurement Task Force of the Transforming Children's Care Global Collaborative Platform. The focus of the workshop was translating research evidence into action.
The Building Positive Futures project was a pilot study that sought to test a range of quantitative and qualitative research tools for use in leaving care studies in Africa, including a peer research approach. As there have been few previous African studies on care leaving, the research team hoped to develop their understanding of how best to conduct cross-country…
Across Africa, there are many young people who do not live with their biological families and grow up in alternative care. Despite knowing that African young people who grow up in care can struggle as they move into adulthood, there is very little research on leaving care in African countries. To help increase understanding of careleaving in Africa, a group of researchers from Queen’s University Belfast in the UK, University of Johannesburg in South Africa, University of Ghana and Makerere University in Uganda came together to do this research. They tested a range of methods to find…
In collaboration with colleagues at Queen’s University Belfast in the UK, this feasibility study was undertaken by a team of academic researchers from the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, University of Ghana and Makerere University in Uganda, all of whom are members of the Africa Network of Care-leaving Researchers (ANCR).
Given the paucity of research on youth transitioning from alternative care (i.e. care-leaving or leaving care) in Africa, the study sought to develop and test a methodology for a cross-country, comparative study on leaving care in Africa. This involved the…
Abstract
Research on young people transitioning out of care due to reaching the age of majority (referred to as care-leaving or aging out of care) is still emerging in South Africa. To date, almost all research on leaving care has focused on the transition out of residential care, with little attention to the transition out of foster care, including cluster foster care (roughly equivalent to group homes in other countries). This paper aims to describe the experiences of youth preparing to age out of cluster foster care in South Africa. Individual interviews were conducted with nine youth…
This report presents the latest findings from the Growth Beyond the Town Girls and Boys Town South Africa (GBTSA)/University of Johannesburg (UJ) joint partnership longitudinal research study. This serves as an update to a similar report that was written in 2019. The report includes data collected since the project’s inception in 2012, up until the last wave of data collection, which took place in late 2019. Presented are the findings from 150 participants who were interviewed as they disengaged from GBTSA, as well as the outcomes of many of these care-leavers that have been measured each…
Abstract
The journey from care to young adulthood is often accompanied by many challenges, making care leavers one of society's most vulnerable populations. Although research on young people leaving residential care is gaining increased attention globally, there is limited research that focuses on female care leavers. This article describes the psychosocial resilience processes that facilitate successful transitioning of young women as they journey out of residential care towards young adulthood. The methodology employed is a modified replication of a previous study with young men, with…
Abstract
Research on care-leaving internationally suggests that young adults with experience of residential or foster care are disproportionately likely to engage in criminal activity and to come into conflict with the law. There is, however, no research on this population in South Africa. This paper reports on a longitudinal study of young people transitioning out of care and journeying towards young adulthood over a period of five years. The sample included 51 participants who had had at least two (and up to five) interviews (spaced approximately a year apart) since leaving care. A mixed…