About Us

OUR MISSION STATEMENT:
COPES-SA mission is to protect children through an outreach of support, education and capacity development for parents, families, communities and professionals, committed to taking care of their children.

OUR VISION:
COPES-SA aspires to build safe, secure, and caring communities for the children.

COPES-SA - GOALS & OBJECTIVES
In pursuit of our Vision and Mission, COPES-SA has set herself the following goals:
- Prevent Child Abuse and Neglect (CAN) from happening in the first instance.
- Reduce the impact of CAN once it has occurred.
- Nurture ‘healthy families and communities’, and thus discourage victim status that is sometimes inadvertently   promoted by ‘welfare programmes’.

Specific Objectives to support these three goals are:
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Create community safety nets for all children through training and support of families and neighbourhoods.
- Protect children at risk especially ‘HIV/AIDS orphans’, children living in inadequate homes, those with substance abuse challenges, and those living in abject poverty.
- Equip families and caregivers with appropriate child-rearing, social and life skills.
- Increase levels of awareness in communities.
- Meaningfully engage children and youth, by creating diversion programmes
- Provide free and culture-sensitive healing to affected children and their families. Because abuse diminishes the ability of a caregiver to take care of his/her children, we provide counselling to women, men, and children who are abused.
- Build capacity for other community-based organisations with similar ideals such as the CommunityPolice Forum and Street Committees.
- Provide cost-effective and cutting-edge training for involved professionals and communities in general.
- Give families incentives to stay healthy, and thus break the victim-handout cycle, through empowerment and income-generating programmes.