Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

News

The Destiny Trust Rallies Support For Education Of Homeless Children

The Destiny Trust, a social intervention providing education, rehabilitation and empowerment to homeless children, is advocating public support for its work with children through a crowdfunding campaign tagged “1000HelpingHands”. 1000 Helping Hands is symbolic for having as many people as possible give towards an important cause of safeguarding the future of kids who otherwise might become a menace to the society. The Trust invites people to give as little as N1,000 this one time so the kids in its care and up to 100 others still on the streets can go to school this September.

Through this campaign, the Trust supports 100 out-of-school and homeless children to enrol or reintegrate into school every year. The proceeds of the crowdfunding is also intended for the feeding, healthcare and education of rehabilitated homeless children who are under the Trust’s continuing care and supervision at its residential learning and rehabilitation centre located at Ibeju-Lekki, Lagos. In the last one year, the Centre provided shelter to up to 20 children, served as a community centre to children in its host community who come in for afterschool assistance and served about 32,850 meals to both resident children and visiting children.

In the 2016 round of the fundraising, the Trust raised a total sum of N1,972,379 from donors mainly on social media channels. Although this was a significant shortfall in the funding target, donors in the 2016 round enabled the Trust’s intervention which benefitted 100 children comprising of children who were newly enrolled in school and others who were assisted to go back to school. They were indigent pupils who only required minimal financial support to buy uniforms, school bags and writing materials to go back to school and benefit from the government’s free education programme. The Trust also upgraded school facilities and expanded classroom capacity at the Lagos Model School, Marwa which accommodated a majority of the beneficiaries. This involved the repair of leaking classroom roofs, provision of classroom furniture in the nursery class, replacing classroom windows, sinking a well for sanitation use, replacing dilapidated whiteboard surface sheets in all the classrooms, renovation of the interior of a new nursery class and provision of classroom wall charts and teaching aids.

On the goal of the 2017 fundraising, Campaign Coordinator, Bukky Shaba stated “we are building a community of 1000 good citizens that will commit to giving at least N1,000 monthly for a period of one year. From our experience, little acts of kindness in this manner can make a big difference in securing the future of the children. Our project has run mainly on this form of support from ordinary people who are concerned about the trend of child illiteracy, poverty and abuse. We need this desperately in uncertain economic times to support the weakest members of the society and we call on individuals and corporate bodies to lend a helping hand. We want people to give and encourage others to give and in this way we can create a future for children who would otherwise have no hope”.

Donations are received through the Trust’s account: The Destiny Trust Projects, GT Bank Plc, 0209963873. Donors can also use a safe and convenient online payment platform following the link www.paystack.com/pay/1000Hands

About The Destiny Trust

The Destiny Trust is providing care, education, empowerment and the development needs of children and households within vulnerable groups. We come through for them in areas of  their greatest need including providing shelter, food, education, guidance, health care, mentoring and other child support services. Our motivation is the possibility of transforming the life of one child who would be a risk to the society if we do not take action.

We commenced our activities on August 11, 2012 with an initiative tagged “The Kuramo Intervention Project”. The Kuramo Intervention Project was a specific intervention targeted at providing education, healthcare, food, shelter and guidance to homeless children at Kuramo Beach and Bar Beach. Although a fun hide-out, the relatively subdued story about some of the beaches on the Atlantic is that they are also a haven to squatters, criminals, commercial sex workers and drug addicts. The Kuramo shoreline was an unpleasant metaphor for poverty and social inequity. At the time, scores of homeless children who have fled home or have become orphaned lived on the beachfront begging, hawking, smoking, drinking, doing illicit drugs and some young girls were used for commercial sex work.  In August 2012, an ocean surge swept off about 16 people, including some homeless children who lived on the Kuramo shoreline. A significant number of these children were displaced from the shoreline and have relocated to other slums along the coastline. They remained as exposed, perhaps even more exposed in the new environments.

Our initial intervention was to provide food and interim relief to children and families at Kuramo/Bar Beach. We organized Soup Kitchens and community outreaches. This form of outreach was necessary for close interaction with street children in order to understand their condition and how we could help. We were later engaged in helping children to retrace and reunite with their families. We also assisted some homeless families to resettle from the beach to decent accommodation provided by the Trust while we sponsored the education of the children and sought means of financial empowerment for their families. The success of the intervention lies in the story of lives that have been transformed from the destitution of life on the beachfront.

The Trust currently runs a learning and rehabilitation centre for street children at Bogije, Ibeju-Lekki, Lagos. The long term plan is to establish a purpose-built residential school and vocational centre to support 100 rehabilitated children per time and to replicate this in all Nigerian cities with a significant urban poor population, starting from Lagos.

 

Signed:

Bukky Shaba

Campaign Coordinator

 

 

__________

Follow us on Twitter at @thesignalng

Copyright 2017 SIGNAL. Permission to use portions of this article is granted provided appropriate credits are given to www.signalng.com and other relevant sources.

Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Advertisement

Related

Entertainment

Nollywood actress, Chioma Akpotha, has narrated how she was allegedly attacked by thugs at her polling unit in Lagos during ongoing Governorship and State...

News

Nigeria’s commercial capital, Lagos has been placed under a partial lockdown by security agencies, the state police commissioner, Abiodun Alabi announced on Wednesday. Alabi...

News

Lagos State chapter of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has announced Nollywood actress Funke Akindele as the deputy governorship candidate in Lagos State for...

News

President Muhammadu Buhari will on Tuesday, March 22, 2022, inaugurate the newly built international terminal of the Murtala Muhammed Airport, Lagos, The Nation reports....

Copyright ©