Charity Overview
Project Playground is a Swedish non-profit organisation which works to increase opportunities for vulnerable children and young people, aged between 4 and 21, regardless of their creed and background. The charity focuses on strengthening young people’s personal and social development through its free after-school activities and sporting programmes. It also offers psychological support, daily nutritious meals as well as enriching and stimulating educational trips during the weekends and school holidays.
On the streets children and young people are often at risk of falling into a life of crime, Project Playground offers a safety net where children can be supported into adulthood. By using leisure time activities and sports as a vehicle to change the mind-set, behaviour and attitudes of these young people from an early age, the charity tackle prejudice, peer-pressure and exclusion. By providing a safe haven Project Playground also gives its beneficiaries a chance to develop self-esteem, ambition, self-confidence, responsibility and a sense of belonging – tools to influence their own lives. This in turn has a ripple effect on the whole of society.
The organisation is politically and religiously independent and has The UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child as its starting-point. Project Playground operates in three townships outside of Cape Town, South Africa; Langa, Philippi and Gugulethu with a total of 750 children participating in its activities.