What we are about..
We share a mindset not a demographic
We want all shapes, sizes, colours, flavours, ages, races. Volunteering in its popularity is attracting everyone, whether you are experiencing the releasing of shackles from education or you are not quite ready for the pipe and slippers and want to take retirement to another level. Basically If playing tourist doesn’t cut it and you want something a little more meaningful… welcome!
Be Interactive
This space is not just about US telling YOU (we have a whole website for that) We want to hear from you…. Questions, comments, posts, blogs, Video, pictures, presentations…. It’s all about sharing the love!
Are you drowning in a sea of Media? If your little blog is desperately holding onto a cybic piece of drift wood, aimlessly bobbing along – drifting out into the open waters….. Then hop on board our raft, because it is big enough for everyone.
Be active and do good!
If you would like to volunteer in Cape Town, and teaching in a primary school is not really your thing, you might want to think about joining our Cape Town Sports Coaching & Physical Education, South Africa Project. This project offers you the opportunity to get a qualification and training experience alongside professional sports coaches while in the stunning surroundings of Cape Town.
This exciting project is being offered in cooperation with Goodsport. Goodsport is currently working in 7 schools in our local community. At each of these schools there is a team of coaches, supervised by a Lead Coach, who will facilitate the physical education lessons. Your role as a volunteer will be to help the team of coaches, and not to run the physical education lessons yourself.
At the beginning of your project you will participate in the Fundamental Movement Training Course. This course is based on the SAQ Continuum (speed, agility and quickness) and ultimately helps you during your volunteering experience and in your future. It gives teachers, coaches and trainers skills guaranteed to develop and improve performance, fundamental and inclusive movement, based on movement and coordination from an early age onwards and is often acquired by sports coaches, nurses, psychologists, teachers etc. to help them in their daily work. The aim of the Fundamental Movements Training is:
To help prepare teachers, coaches and those involved in sport, recreational health and fitness with knowledge and practical skills in SAQ® Training used with children.
To assist practitioners working with school age children, so as to develop their movement skills.
To provide knowledge of important issues that can affect children’s development.
To ensure that important safety points are considered when using the programme.
To introduce the SAQ Continuum and show how it can structure the development of balance and co-ordination, efficient movement mechanics, agility and multi-directional explosive speed and reactions.
To demonstrate how SAQ Training can assist in evaluating Fundamental Movement.
To engage attendees in understanding how SAQ Training can be applied to the development of sports skills in physical education lessons and sports training sessions.
At the end of the one day course you receive a qualification that is valid for eighteen months and can easily be updated all over the world. This additional qualification may prove very valuable on your CV when applying for universities or jobs in a related field. The advantage of doing the initial training in South Africa is that Goodsport ensures that you train alongside qualified and trained SAQ coaches. In addition to this, to see underprivileged children benefiting from Fundamental Movement training first-hand is a unique and gratifying experience.
The advantage of cooperation with Goodsport is that volunteers can participate in additional courses in several different disciplines at a small extra cost. These courses include: The Performance Sports Movement Award, The Special Education Movement Award, The Early Development Award and the International Diploma and they can really boost your work in other fields. Finally, Goodsport also offers a great platform with the SAQ community where volunteer can participate before and after volunteering.
If you are interested in volunteering in the sports field and obtaining a qualification at the same time, take a look at our website or give us a call at 0027 (0)87 751 3977.
Win a holiday for two to Kerala!
Virgin Holidays Responsible Tourism Awards 2012
Nominate your favorite responsible tourism company for the Virgin Holidays Responsible Tourism Awards 2012.
“The Responsible Tourism Awards are on the hunt for the shining stars of responsible tourism – those organisations that go beyond the norm to create experiences that benefit the destinations we visit. To be considered for an Award an organisation needs is to be nominated in any one of our 13 categories.
The Awards launched in April with an exclusive interview with the BBC presenter Simon Reeve in the Metro, the UK’s leading free newspaper with an audience of 3.3 million people. The Awards were founded in 2004 to celebrate the most inspiring stories in responsible tourism. Organised by responsibletravel.com, we work with Metro, World Travel Market, Geographical magazine, and the International Centre of Responsible Tourism to celebrate and inspire change in the tourism industry The Awards rest on a simple principle – that all types of tourism, from niche to mainstream, can and should be organized in a way that preserves, respects and benefits destinations and local people.”
Newsletter Virgin Holidays Responsible Tourism Awards
If you liked volunteering with us you can nominate us in the category “Best volunteer organization”. You can do so on the website of Virgin Holidays Responsible Tourism Awards and therewith enter the chance to win a holiday for two to Kerala.
- Newsletter Virgin Holidays
- Responsible Tourism Awards
If you would like more information or if you would like to book now, go to our website for our Cape Town projects or call us at 0027 (0)87 751 3977. We are looking forward to meeting you.
Chance Of a Lifetime Travel (COLT)
We are happy to announce that we have a new partner for promoting our volunteer opportunities in the UK. Chance Of a Lifetime Travel (COLT) is a family run business based in Cambridge, UK.
Established in 2004, COLT is the only company to offer African Impact projects exclusively. All COLT employees have lived and worked in Africa, or have travelled extensively on the continent visiting the various projects that we are so passionate about. This means that they can answer almost every question that potential volunteers may have and are always happy to assist.
“To speak plainly, our USP (unique selling proposition) is service. We aim to remove any fear of the unknown. We pride ourselves on the unlimited help we can provide you when deciding to make that first leap of faith to travel to Africa. Once you have journeyed in Africa and the bug has bitten, Africa stays in your heart and you keep returning. No question is too trivial. Short of packing for you we will help you with absolutely anything you ask of us.”
Not only does COLT help individual volunteers or people looking for a gap year opportunity, they also cater to school trips. COLT is run by teachers with a lot of experience in organising and leading school expeditions.
Details of the various projects on offer as well as their contact details can be found at www.coltgap.com. You can also take a look at our website for information on all the projects on offer.
Looking at how the Lion is paramount to Africa’s whole ecosystem!
Not only is the lion an iconic symbol to Africa but the following two stories have been published recently to highlight different reasons why the lion is imperative to Africa.
As an apex predator the lion is vital to proper ecosystem function; its loss within African terrestrial ecosystems could result in serious and unpredictable repercussions throughout the food chain and ecosystem negatively affecting numerous taxa.
The first story is centred on the increase of zebra populations within Uganda. In the 1960s the population of zebra in the East African country was estimated at 10,000. Their numbers declined to 5,500 in 1982, to 3200 in 1995 and to as low as 2,800 in 2003. Today, according to the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) the population of zebras in Uganda is now estimated at 11,814, triple the numbers that were encountered a decade ago.
Zebra are considered one of the most dominant herbivore species, often out-competing other ruminants due to their greater spatial distribution and foraging tactics. However such biological characteristics make them more vulnerable to predation and it has been suggested zebra populations are mostly limited by predation rather than the availability of food resources. Within an ecosystem the annual off-take of large numbers of zebra by predators such as lions limits population density numbers and therefore allows other less competitive herbivore species to sustain themselves within the vegetative carrying capacity. Whilst a recovery of any species within Africa’s wildlife areas is good news, without population regulation of zebra through predation, species such as the zebra may out-compete other herbivores within a given area leading to inter-specific issues and a reduction in overall biodiversity.
Lions in Uganda have been in the news many times over the past few years as numbers have declined sharply, with an estimated 415 left.
The second recent story is from the blog of the Lion Guardian program operating in and around Kenya’s Amboseli National Park where only 60 lions are estimated to remain. There, attacks by hyena are on the increase, and replacing lions as a significant source of conflict with humans and their livestock. According to the article “The Maasai community respect and admire lions because they cannot attack livestock unless they are hungry. And even when they do, they kill only what they can eat. For example in a herd of 100 cows, they only kill one. But hyenas kill any moving livestock even if they can no longer eat, which is why they are so disliked by pastoralists”. The hyena are described as “…on the rampage. Their attacks on livestock, at bomas and in the bush when they get lost, are now stretching communal tolerance towards carnivores. Reports of their attacks are not confined to a particular locality, rather they are widely distributed across the ecosystem.”
One outcome of apex predator removal is the rise of mesopredators – those smaller members of the predator guild that are characterized by living in high densities, and have high rates of recruitment and dispersal. A population explosion of baboons through the removal of lion and leopard in some areas has led to a cascade of events including baboons preying on the young of antelopes, causing significant crop damage, raiding the nests of bird species, and even keeping children out of school to help protect maize fields from ravenous troops of these monkeys. Another aspect of increasing mesopredator populations is economic. Higher populations can cause the same or new conflicts with man and costs of artificially controlling numbers can be high due to the high density in which mesopredators can thrive.
It is vital that top-down regulation of prey and the impacts on mesopredator populations is acknowledged and considered within in-situ conservation efforts for apex predators. The loss of the lion within African terrestrial ecosystems could result in serious and unpredictable repercussions throughout the food chain and ecosystem negatively affecting numerous taxa.
If you are interested in conservation work with lions, take a look at our website and participate in our “Hands-On Lion Conservation Volunteering” in Livingstone, Antelope Park or Victoria Falls.
