We as the Hope Town community love God and love people by creating opportunities for holistic development through education, skills training & mentoring.
We are working in a community called Ocean View, where about 40’000 ‘coloured’ (a South African term used for those who are not ‘black’ or ‘white’) people live. Ocean View was born as a township during Apartheid, built for the forcefully removed coloured people from around the area. Ocean View is built on a hillside with a truly lovely view of the ocean! The coloured people are lively, loud, good entertainers and have a love for good music and dance.
There are though also multiple challenges facing the people here. High unemployment, drugs, crime, prostitution and young people falling out of school are daily issues we encounter.
HOPE TOWN
We want to bring hope and perspective to the young people at risk. In 2016 we founded HopeTown, a Youth Community and Youth Movement in Ocean View. We gather with different age groups once a week in our HopeTown Base and eat together, listen to each other and to God and experience a kind of a family what supports each other and where people find a place of belonging. Our family members are not those you would easily find in church. Gang members, teenage mother and fathers, school drop outs and young people who struggle with addiction learn to love each other and are discovering God. Our HopeTown family is diverse, wild and imperfect and hungry for change.
HOPE EDUCATION CENTRE
We provide a safe space for struggling High Schoolers to learn and grow in their academics. Our centre is open three afternoons a week to support, encourage and tutor the young people in their homework and help them to achieve better marks.
We challenge them to grow, train their learning skills, to get a vision for education and qualifications and to help them in finding direction towards their professional future.
ART EDUCATION
We invest into creativity. There is so much more in life to be discovered and explored and we love to help them on the journey. We train the young people to think outside of the box and how to start to draw from scratch. We aim to to raise young, passionate creative people with a sense for beauty and the basic skills to design their own picture or to edit videos.
SKILL TRAINING PROGRAM
There is huge unemployment among the young people in Ocean View. Those who have dropped out of school often have no chance to get a job. We believe this doesn’t need to be the end. We print high quality T-Shirts and train young people on the job. We want to see them grow in social skills, work ethics, character, team work, quality control, self confidence and to become more job-ready for their next step in life.
KEEP IN TOUCH
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