New Year, New Resolutions

Dear Friends,

I pray this finds you well 10 days into the new year! Team Nhaka is very excited about this year especially about ensuring that we move forward stronger as a team, our increased passion and desire to see all the children accessing equal opportunities for their growth and development.

As we begin this year I thought it would be interesting for me to share with you some of our resolutions for this year. We sat down as a team to discuss the different things that we wanted to accomplish in 2013 and how we could do these things effectively and in a manner that builds up accountability first to the donors and partners and secondly to the communities that are being served. We looked at how in 2013 we want to ensure that community participation becomes key in the transformation of the same communities from being receipients of aid to communities that have solutions and that are able to also be givers and "donors" in their own right. In this the team was cognisant of the fact that many organizations operating in Zimbabwe are offering and applying a bandaid to the problems that communities face and not an actual treatment and follow up mechanism.

We are determined in 2013 to make sure that we support the empowerment process of the grandmothers, uncles, aunts, grandfathers as caregivers of orphaned children as well as strengthening our parenting programs where we want to make sure that the caregivers have got the requisite knowledge, skill and resources to offer solutions to the challenges they face on a daily basis. In doing this we are ensuring that we are leaving a lasting legacy but more importantly the strength based approaches to development will leave the communities ready to take head on the burden brought about by caring for additional members of the family. 

We also intend to ensure that Nhaka Foundation is well resourced to carry out its work and that we are able to ensure that no child or community is left out of the circle. It is important that we do not spend much time looking at the resource side of things but that we concentrate and put a lot of effort to ensure that the communities are able to stand up and walk without any outside assistance. In this regard I was asked to have more "fierce" conversations with our friends and partners as we ask you to join in this mission and ensure that we reach out to the children and communities.

Team Nhaka aims to ensure that the Preschool program is more robust and is able to provide quality early learning for the thousands of children in our operational areas. Riding on the back of our recent approval to work in all the schools in Mashonaland East Province, we want to ensure that each district has a preschool program being implemented and that access to early education and development remains at the centre of our work. All parents are interested in helping their infants and young children learn and grow. Through parenting meetings and activities, they learn more about their children’s development and how to stimulate more learning in their children. They learn the importance of play to their infants and young children’s development, and this knowledge and experience empowers them to be their children’s most important teacher.

Friends, brace up as 2013 is going to be exciting and we all need to get our hands dirty as we work to be the change we wish to see in the world!

Challenges are what make life interesting; overcoming them is what makes life meaningful.
-Joshua J. Marine

Best regards,

Patrick