Young Heroes

 

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Young Heroes: A New Program to Help the Orphans of Swaziland

• Young Heroes is an innovative charity, based in Mbabane, Swaziland whose mission is to help the orphan families stay together on their homesteads and in their communities by mobilizing sponsors to provide them with funds for food and clothing – the basic necessities of life that they so often lack.

• To accomplish this, Young Heroes seeks people and organizations who will make a year’s commitment to support a family, either in whole or in part, with monthly donations of $19.95 per child for food and, if possible, an additional $10.00 for clothing. Our primary goal is to keep orphan families alive, healthy and living together on their homesteads and in their communities, where they have the greatest sense of safety and security.

• Young Heroes is a creation of Swaziland’s National Emergency Response Council on HIV/AIDS (NERCHA). Stephen Lewis, the UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy for AIDS in Africa, recently called NERCHA “one of the most impressive National AIDS Councils in all of Africa.”

Swaziland: The World’s Highest Rate of HIV/AIDS

• Tiny Swaziland has the highest rate of AIDS in the world: According to the most recent Global Sentinel Survey, 39.2% of adults aged 15-49 are infected with HIV. Amongst women aged 25-29, the rate is higher than 48%.

• In other words, nearly half of the women in their prime child-bearing years are HIV positive or ill with AIDS-related problems.

• Already, there are some 70,000 orphans in Swaziland, including 15,000 child-headed households. That number is projected to rise to 120,000 by the year 2010. Given that Swaziland has a population of just over 1 million, that means that over 10% of Swazis will be orphans four years from now. And that number will continue to grow for at least a decade.

• Compounding the problems these child face is another consequence of the epidemic: the breakdown of the extended family. As more people in young adulthood sicken and die, families lose the resources to cope with their immediate needs, much less to extend help to the children of relatives. As a result, the orphans lucky enough to have a caretaker usually live with their grandmother (and sometimes grandfather, if he still lives). This provides some security, but these caretakers are at the stage of life when their families should be taking care of them. In most cases they are too old to work – if there were work to be had – and sometimes, they are even too old to farm.

• As a result, Swazi orphans are in desperate need of the most basic necessities of life. They lack food and clothing, and they often do not have enough money to pay school fees. This makes them vulnerable to abuse from anyone who will offer them a meal – or even anyone who knows that they have no one to turn to.

• Make no mistake: for Swazi orphans, rural Swaziland is a disaster area. But because AIDS is a slow-motion disaster, the depth and extent of what they face is rarely something people see on the news.

How Young Heroes Works

• With the help of local organizations and community members, Young Heroes employees identify and enroll orphan families all throughout Swaziland.

• They provide the family caretaker with a Young Heroes identification card with his or her picture. This caretaker is usually a grandmother, the eldest child or a trusted relative, neighbor or community member. The caretaker uses this ID card to collect the funds Young Heroes has raised for the family each month at the nearest post office.

• They add the families to our database for inclusion on our Web site, http://youngheroes.org.sz.

• Visitors to the site may select a specific family to sponsor for a year; sponsor where the need is greatest, in which case Young Heroes selects the family based on our knowledge of them; or give a one-time donation. In that case, Young Heroes aggregate funds until they have enough to feed one child for one year, then assign it to a family.

• Sponsors are asked to commit to $19.95 (114 Emalangeni) per child per month for food, or $29.95 (174 Emalangeni) per child per month for food and clothing.

• Sponsors may donate by credit card via PayPal; by electronic transfer into the Young Heroes bank account at First National Bank in Mbabane, Swaziland; by international money order; or by check to our American counterpart, Young Heroes Foundation.

• Each month, the full amount of funds collected for the families is wired to Swazi Post and Telecom. Along with this, Young Heroes provide a detailed breakdown of the amount to be given to each sponsored family. The postal service sends these instructions, together with receipt forms, to the pertinent post office nearest the family.

• They also offer sponsors the ability to write to their families via our Web site. If a sponsor writes, Young Heroes will translate the letter into siSwati and include it with the funds going to the family. Similarly, when a family writes back, they will translate the letter into English and email it back to the sponsor.

• The family caretaker presents the picture ID card at the post office; collects the family funds; and signs a receipt.

• The postal service returns the receipt forms to Young Heroes for verification.

• Three days per week, Young Heroes staff members make site visits to sponsored families, both to ensure that the program is working well and to monitor that the funds are being spent appropriately. A family misusing donations is given one warning and monitored more closely. If a problem persists, the family is removed from the program and the donor notified.

• Young Heroes' goal in creating this system has been to develop procedures that are as transparent and accountable as possible, and to create as direct a link as possible between the sponsor and the family, with a minimum of administration in between.

Important Program Notes

• Young Heroes has a staff of just four full-time employees and a total budget upon inception of $80,000 for its first year of operation and $60,000 for its second.

• NERCHA underwrites all costs of the Young Heroes program, with the small exception of unavoidable financial fees such as bank wiring fees, PayPal transaction fees and foreign exchange fees. To help cover these costs, Young Heroes ask sponsors to add a token $0.95 per month. All other monies received go directly to the orphan families.

• Unlike similar programs, Young Heroes’ sponsorship is done for a family, not for an individual child in that family. Our goal, as stated above, is to give children the security of staying together in a place they know, and providing them with the food they need. So the benefits of a Young Heroes sponsorship flow to the whole family.

• And unlike other programs that use the concept of child sponsorship to raise funds for community projects that offer indirect benefits, Young Heroes’ goal is to offer immediate and ongoing relief to children who need food, clothes and hope today.

• Young Heroes realizes that these families often grapple with unusually high healthcare costs (many of the children in our program are HIV+). Young Heroes is looking into ways to offset these healthcare costs and are currently screening children in our program and bringing medical professionals directly to homesteads that require immediate attention.

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