By Marie Slundt | Marketing and Fundraising Executive
Dear GlobalGiving supporters,
Firstly, a warm thank you from us, our shelter residents and homeless clients.
Finally, we are starting to experience spring and better weather here in Cape Town. This winter has been unforgiven. Some might be surprised that we complain about cold in South Africa, but it can be and this year was pretty bad. We even had snow on Table Mountain one day. Those circumstances are especially hard for those of our clients who live on the streets, so we tried our best to hand out blankets.
We started two new art therapy programmes in July and it is going really well. One is a mixed group of individuals who experience homelessness and the other is specifically for women to have a safe space to address GBV. Entering the room when a group is in session - gives you this sense of calm and reflection in a safe space created by the therapists and among the participants themselves.
In August we celebrated Women's Day here in South Africa and The Hope Exchange marked it with a high tea for our female clients where we had several speakers and general talks about the power of sisterhood.
Besides our day-to-day social care programs and services, we are busy preparing for World Homeless Day in October. Now being the third year doing so, it has become a tradition to mark the day with a social and fun run with our clients - #thehomelessrun. We have been collecting well-kept used sneakers, so each participant gets a pair before the run. We then all run together and end the afternoon with food, medals and celebration. Our clients love it and it is a good way to show the outside world that we are all humans and we enjoy the same things like social activities.
We appreciate the support we receive, but we do hope you will share our cause with your network. Organisations like ours experience cuts in funding from the city and regional government and we rely more and more on private giving.
Please reach out if you would like to know more about our work and have any questions.
Kind regards
Marie (marie@thehopeexchange.org)
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