The Children’s Act of South Africa (1983) calls on Child and Youth Care Centres (CYCCs) to offer transitional support to youth leaving care. Mamelani, an organisation in South Africa, has been active in this area of work for several years, providing ‘transitional support’ and responding to what was identified as a severe lack of options for young people exiting state care at age 18.
In 2012, Mamelani began an assessment of the content and focus of its transitional support programme. The aim was to consolidate its existing practice as well as to discover and implement new ways of ensuring more participants in its programme make a successful transition out of care. What became clear from this process was that a new approach to working with this target group was essential to ensure long-term, sustainable change in their lives – a move away from one-size-fits-all interventions to a more individualised, integrated and process-driven approach. Mamelani has chosen to document and share this information gathering exercise to see how its approach might be applicable to other CYCCs in the child and youth care sector and to begin to gather data on young people leaving care, beyond the group that we have worked with to date.
