We have been able to fully re-connect with our partner Child and Youth Care Centres in South Africa, after the pandemic. It's been wonderful to meet new mentees face-to-face after such a long time.
As SAYes mentors come from all over the World, having a stable connection to the young people on our mentoring programme is as important as ever. Your donations contribute to the costs of mobile phones, data and training.
Recently, we marked Mental Health Awareness Week with a selection of quotes taken from SAYes mentee questionnaires. Amongst other things, we learned from the mentees that having a trusted adult consistently showing up each week for them, helped to foster their health and well-being. Having your support on this project - which keeps our mentors and mentees connected - really makes a difference.
We were thrilled to deliver refurbished laptops to our partner Child and Youth Care Centres at St George's, Girls and Boys Town (for their locations at Kenilworth and Macassar), and St Michael's. The hardware was kindly donated by funding partners the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG).
This donation, along with your support of mobiles phones and data, means that SAYes mentees really have worldwide connections.
Thank you for all that you do for SAYes Mentoring, we know that you are with us every step of the way.
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Welcome to our latest project update.
Our fundraising raffle in November was run on Giving Tuesday, via a microproject for 'Support our Mentors and Mentees' main project. We were delighted to exceed our goal by more than double. The raffle prize was a fantastic piece of artwork donated from renouned artist SuzannK. Suzann and Michelle met one day at a London train station after Suzann offered to help Michelle with her luggage. They had a conversation about the work of SAYes, so we were delighted that Suzann later connected with us, offering her art for a raffle. She has remained a firm supporter of SAYes ever since.
Funds raised will go towards providing mobile phones and data for mentees in order to support our mentoring programme. We continue to recruit mentors from around the world so money will also go to training these mentors to be part of our e-mentoring programme.
For monthly updates on the work that we do at SAYes, why not subscribe to our newsletter? Just scroll to the bottom of our website home page and hit subscribe.
Thank you for your continued support and love, we couldn't do this without you.
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London Stock Exhange
As our organisation continues to grow and expand, so do our projects and partners. We are delighted to announce our new funding partnership with the London Stock Exchange.
GlobalGiving Matching Campaign
We exceeded the $1000 fundraising target that we set during the April campaign. The littlexlittle fundraisers run twice yearly, where over a 5-day period GlobalGiving match 50% of all donations made through the GlobalGiving website (up to a value of $50). Thank you to all our supporters who contributed and made this fundraiser such
a success.
Happy Birthday SAYes Mentoring
We celebrated our 14th Birthday at the beginning of September which coincided with us reaching our GlobalGiving fundraising target. What a great birthday present!
SAYes and NIKE partnership
Earlier this year, SAYes and NIKE teamed up to offer 25 fully sponsored slots on our 9-month e-mentoring programme for young people living in South Africa. We are excited to start sharing some of the Mentor and Mentee journeys. Read their individual stories on our photo attachments with this report.
Meet our mentees
We have new interviews on our blog feature, 'Meet our Mentees'. Keep checking our website blog each week to read more about our mentees.
Netto Workshop
Netto hosted a fantastic workshop for SAYes mentees, in support of The Financial Planning Institute South Africa's MyMoney123 Programme. Their team shared their respective responsibilities at Netto Invest; talked about financial planning; and showed mentees how best to manage their personal budgets.
In April, we signed up for GlobalGiving's Little by Little fundraising campaign, where GlobalGiving matched 50% of all donations up to 50 dollars. This was a great success - thanks to our supporters. With GlobalGiving's contribution we raised close to $650, which helped towards programme costs. Due to our success with this campaign we will sign up with GlobalGiving to do it again in September.
Here are some of the ways we are developing our mentoring programme:
In the UK, our first mentees graduated from our pilot programme. We have had some great feedback, some of which is "life-changing". More will graduate in the coming months and we will share our full pilot report with you when they have. We are now looking to expand our support to more young care leavers throughout the UK through our local authority partners and through referrals from our graduating mentees.
Our third year in partnership with Waves for Change is up and running. Waves for Change is a fantastic organisation supporting children and young people, using surfing as a tool to support their mental health needs. We are delighted to be working in partnership with them again this year providing mentorship to their young intern surf coaches.
In South Africa we are delighted to be working with St Michael's Child and Youth Care Centre in Cape Town again. St Michael's was one of our first partner children's homes, so we really are thrilled to have reconnected with them and to be providing mentorship support to the young people who are planning to exit the home now that they are approaching 18.
Loadshedding (power cuts) continue to make online meetings a challenge in South Africa, but we are happy to report that the majority of our mentors and mentees have found a way to continue to meet on a weekly basis. Where there's a will there's a way!
We continue to work with care leavers throughout South Africa and with our partner child and youth care centres. Now that covid restrictions have been removed, we look forward to connecting with them all again.
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
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