Boikanyo the Dion Herson Foundation

Boikanyo the Dion Herson Foundation aims to address the suffering of communities who live below the breadline, the animals who share their living spaces, and environmental issues which result from inadequate distribution of resources and assistance.We network extensively with local NGOs/NPO's to better understand specific problems plagueing disempowered communities. We source projects and fund resources as part of the solution. We began assisting indigent profoundly disabled children in a huge public hospital in Soweto in 2009 with disability equipment, stimulation in the wards, and advocacy advice. We ensured chronically ill/terminal children went home and did not 'live' in hospital.Our charitable trust was established in order to respond to this need in 2011. In 2012 we moved from the assisting in the hospital to assisting similar children who lived in abject poverty in various squatter camps near to the hospital. We focused on Protea South squatter camp where we worked with an organisation of social workers until 2018. We made a huge impact in the areas we worked in. We aimed at empowering the child to stay in school no matter how difficult external circumstances proved to be, to locate and assist caregivers of children with disability in the squatter camp, and to give a voice to those whose rights were being marginalised. We planted a community vegetable garden the size of a soccer field, we did large handouts of sanitary pads, school uniforms, shoes and socks and brought in a very successful maths program which saw a group of grade 4 and 5 learners at a local school go from an average of 17% in maths, to an average of 60% at the end of the year-long program. The governments response to the 2019 Covid 19 outbreak lead to a very restrictive lockdown in South Africa with terrible consequences. People started losing their jobs as businesses and shops closed. People lost their homes, starvation set in, and despair became the norm. We made a decision to start handing out e'Pap - a porridge enriched with vitamin and minerals - to as many rural families as we could. We focused on children and the elderly, we feared they would die of starvation first. We handed out R2m of e'Pap porridge, we fed over 100 000 people for more than 30 days each. In 2021 we refocused on 3 aspects: 1. Assisting shack dwelling children with special needs:'Chair'ished Children' is a project that has provided hundreds of specialised wheelchairs (buggies) to impoverished indigent children born with cerebral palsy and who live in the squatter camps, as well as in deep rural South Africa. This initiative takes us to areas which are remote and inaccessible, here there are so few resources and caring for a profoundly disabled child is not easy at all.. The sight of an elderly caregiver carrying a disabled teenager on her back is disturbing, and we seek to remedy that.Most of the children we fit into buggies have waited years for a mobility device, some die waiting. 2.Advocacy'Human Touch' is a project in which we pride ourselves on being a voice for the voiceless and advocates of Human Rights. As such, we are often called on to intervene on behalf of people who find themselves totally helpless, in hopeless situations. Many of them are foreign nationals and are fearful of being exposed. For those who live so inhumanely, days are spent in survival mode with little energy or time to think of ways out of the turmoil. Boikanyo the Dion Herson Foundation has spent many hours demanding that equality and dignity applies to the community we serve. We force government to take responsibility for much of the misery that is all around, and in some instances we call on other organsiations with legal clout who will assist. 3. Combatting trauma through animalsOur program 'More than Paws" has been running since early 2020, when Covid19 swept the world. The trauma that residents endured in the informal shack-dwelling communities skyrocketed. Children lost parents, grandparents, caregivers, and siblings. Unemployment was rife, and there was just no money to buy food. There was a staggering increase in assaults and abuse. Children particularly, suffered terrible hardships.We observed that people have become very dependent on their pets for love. Sometimes loving an animal is, in many cases, provided the only love that a person knew. When beloved pets got sick, owners were distraught. To this end we began sponsoring an animal inspector to come into the area once a month to assist us in teaching residents (mostly children and the elderly) how to look after their animals .We have seen that kindness to animals rebounds onto humans.