Dearest friends
I hope you are in a good space! I appreciate that you have continued to follow our journey throughout this challenging time. Your heart for the babies and the important work that happens here through the hands of our remarkable care team has made a real difference in our ability to keep going.
It’s been just over a year since TLC communicated that it was going to have to close its doors. But thanks to your unwavering support and real commitment we have survived another year! Thank you so much! We are confident that your longstanding support reflects your interest in our efforts to keep, the important work TLC does, going. We encourage you to read this note with an open heart and mind.
2019 was a difficult year and the Management Team and our deeply committed Board have had a long hard look at the issues we face and how to make our home more resilient in the face of these many challenges. I am happy to tell you we have found a way but it is a big deal and so here I am sharing with you some of the details around our plans to move TLC Children’s Home from its home for the last 22 years.
A move of this nature is a big decision and was not one made lightly. The current TLC premises represents not simply just our home, but also a significant part of who we are, as it may for you. We have memories here that are interwoven into our very selves. We have invested the deepest parts of our hearts into making this place “Home” for hundreds of babies when they needed us, and we did a lot of soul searching before coming to the realisation that we could still do that but from a better location.
We have been communicating our biggest challenges for years now, and they remain our financial sustainability and our physical security.
After a rigorous year we believe the best shot we have of continuing the important work we do is to move the Children’s Home to a smaller, more safely located premises, not far from our current site.
By reducing the size of the property, we would naturally reduce the expense incurred in its maintenance, staffing and securing.
The additional benefit is that the property we have identified is in a “secure suburb”, (an area with restricted access) and on a panhandle property buffered on 3 sides by neighbours. It is a much more secure environment and not near the Informal settlement, where our current, continuous crime incursions stem from.
By staying within a 10-minute drive of our current site we preserve our local support base and maintain our government registration which depends on us providing our services in the area.
We really hope you will support us during this transition and that you may even consider going out of your way to help us grow our network of supporters so that we can mobilise as many resources as possible to make this happen quickly.
We will be able to literally pick up and move our operations as soon as the site is ready, so from that side there will be minimal expense.
The bigger challenge of course is to raise as much of our goal of $330 000 (R5 Million) as possible to cover the costs of the purchase and minor renovations to make the property work for our purpose.
I know it seems like a lot, but we are going to make a push for it so that the loan we are securing from the bank can be as small a burden as possible.
Please join us in putting your thinking cap on and let’s find a way to keep TLC working!
We love and appreciate your support so much. Please feel welcome to connect with me if you’d like to talk through any ideas or if you just want to chat about things.
Hopefully yours
Managing Director
