ARTS-BASED CHILD PSYCHOSOCIAL SUPPORT & HOLISTIC DEVELOPMENT
Intlantsi is currently active in 8 villages of Peddie district: Mgababa, Mpekweni, Ntloko, Peddie town, Wesley, Gcinisa, Crossroads and Lovers Twist, reaching between 800-1000 children in 9 schools weekly. We offer child-centred, age-appropriate, multi-medium arts activities from grades R to 9 during school hours, in their classrooms. Sessions are delivered by trainees and facilitators ranging between 1 to 12 years of Intlantsi training and experience. As often as possible, our facilitators organise and host arts showcases for parents/guardians and the broader community to expose them to the children’s creative processes and garner their support.
Our CWP partnership ensures our service delivery to schools is consistent. Children can rely on our sessions and our presence regardless of funding gaps.
Children are provided with materials and basic skills in visual arts, drama, puppetry, storytelling, creative writing and poetry, music and dance-movement. Only enough practical skills (for example, mixing powder paint, sewing a puppet glove) are provided for them be able to engage in further discovery of and expression through the mediums by themselves, and these skills are demonstrated (preferably by other children), NOT instructed or taught. The aim is for children to develop their own skills through trial, error and play, not through teaching. Beyond that, even if we are working with a social justice theme for a period (e.g. bullying, substance abuse, GBV), sessions are largely non-directive. In other words, children produce their own content.
The result is increased connection, confidence and lived-experience of their own, inner creativity, and the power of group/communal creativity. In the process, the children’s dreams, disappointments, fears and traumas emerge safely and become visible to those around them. This fosters a sense of shared human experience, belonging and empathy.
COMMUNITY ARTS REPAIR PRACTITIONER TRAINING
Due to the geographic inaccessibility of our beneficiary communities, Intlantsi has intentionally established itself as a training body for lower level, ‘auxiliary’ healing arts practitioners in order to reach vaster numbers of children where the practitioners live. Because our pool of practitioners grew and were educated in the same environment facing the same challenges as described in our problem statement, it is essential we co-create the training to ensure it is embedded in our context, completely accessible and relevant. We therefore use an apprenticeship model rooted in a cycle of practice, reflection, learning and implementation.
All training is mainly in isiXhosa (with full translation whenever English is used) and is largely experiential. It progresses through 4 different levels. Introductory and Basic Level are mostly delivered by our 3 Higher Level facilitators currently Training-as-Trainers. New recruits complete one term observing their trainer delivering sessions in school, with the purpose of identifying specific core skills. Introductory Level: After an observation term, trainees gradually start to co-facilitate increasingly larger portions of the sessions until they are holding the full session whilst their trainer observes, looking for implementation of those core skills. Each term focuses on mastering a different family of facilitation skills. Basic Level: trainees negotiate a relationship with their own local school and start working independently, with on-site support visits from their trainers and the Art Therapist. Intermediate Level: trainees deepen their core skills, practise their own personal arts-repair processes, and carry increasing administrative tasks for the organisation (learning-through-doing, to foster project ownership).
Group training sessions (peer practice reflection, democratic decision-making process etc.) ideally occur 3 Fridays per month (if funding permits) at our arts centre in Lovers Twist village. Reduced contact, hybrid models are used when travel funds are limited. When funding allows, intensive one-week residential training blocks are held each school holiday for the whole team. There are no fixed timeframes attached to any level of training. People are free to grow and progress at their own pace, with constant mentoring and evaluation. We ‘graduate’ to the next phase once everyone agrees we are equipped for it. Self-assessment and assessment by the group are a key part of our process.
This training model is also a model of expansion. Transport costs are one of the biggest hurdles to increasing our reach, and one of our biggest sustainability threats. Local taxis are the cheapest way to move between villages. Our model enables experienced facilitators to recruit and train, largely self-sustainably, to a level where participants can start delivering sessions independently in their own villages. Intermediate and Higher-Level training is more heavily dependent on funding. Our model aims to capacitate Trainers across the entire local municipality, to enable new recruits to train in their closest neighbouring villages up to Basic Level.
HIGHER LEVEL = TRAIN-THE-TRAINER PROGRAMME
Intlantsi’s Train-the-Trainer approach is designed specifically to foster project ownership and support the sustainability of the organisation, according to our mantra of “creative development BY the community FOR the community THROUGH the community”. Modules for Introductory and Basic Level training continue to be designed by facilitators who have been in the programme from the outset. Workshop processes identify the core skills we find most useful and explore how we acquired those skills. Course content is therefore described, recorded, developed and constantly revised by us as the people who receive it, in our own languaging, lay terms and terminologies.
The process by which we create our curriculums is acknowledged by aligned organisations as being uniquely decolonised and accessible. The ownership of the content that Trainers deliver makes it more accessible to our apprentices. Higher Level unfolds naturally in the same reflexive, cyclical manner as the rest of the training programme. Each trainer adopts a new apprentice and mentors them to Basic Level whilst supported by the Art Therapist through monthly group reflection sessions and quarterly intensive residentials where curriculum content is constantly reviewed.
PROJECT OWNERSHIP AND SUCCESSION
3 founding facilitators currently on Higher Level training as trainers, are now Managers-in-Training. The rest of the team are also growing their administrative skills. Via an ongoing process of identifying their individual strengths and comfort zones, we divide daily, weekly and monthly administrative tasks into clusters they each take full responsibility for, mentored by the director, and currently a Bridging Operational Manager. We also pay local, unemployed youth with IT skills to provide computer literacy training and support focused purely on real admin tasks. This model of on-site ‘learning-through-doing’, or applied IT training is a) affordable compared to paying for transportation and IT course fees, and b) more relevant than struggling to translate conceptual, abstract training to the actual tasks and contexts of our very particular administration needs. We are grateful to SOLON Foundation SA and The Learning Trust for the intensive push they are currently supporting in our capacity building and succession preparation.
COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
To date most of our community engagement has been through events to raise awareness about what we do through showcasing the children’s work. It is essential, however, for our stakeholders to directly experience the power of the arts, especially in communities where indigenous arts have been suppressed and restricted for centuries, and access to formal arts education denied. One of our new strategic goals is therefore to move beyond showcasing increasingly into experiential workshops and healing arts offerings to parents, teachers and the wider community.
The main aim of community engagement is increased ownership and sustainability of the project by the community. Throughout 2016-17 the team received informal Community Development Practitioner (CDP) training from Ncedeka Beja, our founding Project Manager. She was in the first cohort of DGMT’s Activate! leadership training and also completed their CDP training. Ncedeka guided the teams to map out and tap into their community’s assets to boost our sustainability. In 2022 we attended a one-week Asset Based Community Development training with Ikhala Trust in Gqeberha, introducing our newcomers to these concepts. Our communities often make incorrect assumptions about us having money and jobs as an organisation, which makes asking for favours, volunteering or in-kind assistance from community members extremely arduous. Building these relationships and deepening public understanding about how we function is crucial to our success.
ARTS FESTIVALS
Originally our organisational base and many of our facilitators were in Hamburg, a fishing village and tourist destination on the mouth of the Keiskamma river. For many generations there was a tradition in Hamburg of an annual Christmas party for the children of the village, sponsored and hosted by the regular tourists flocking to their holiday homes for December. There were naturally many problematic dynamics and social issues surrounding this event. Intlantsi offered to take over the hosting as a means of making the event more relevant to the community, and simultaneously as a practice-ground for our facilitators to entertain large numbers of children through arts activities.
The party transitioned from being an event where children queued up for cake and gifts to an ‘arty-party’ of drama games, creating songs and dances, face-painting and art-making together. Our intention was to shift their experience from being recipients of hand-outs from wealthy, white, holiday-makers, to experiencing the joy of their own creativity in community. Over a few years this party organically evolved into what became the RiverSONG Festival.
In collaboration with Msaki and her company OneShushuday Artistry, we conceptualised and piloted a development festival in which highly experienced, accomplished artists, nationally and internationally famous, interacted, shared skills and co-created with local up-coming artists and with Intlantsi child-beneficiaries to give exposure and inspiration. We ran a few small scale, unfunded pilots between 2014 – 2017, and in 2018 hosted a full 3-day festival using homestay accommodation to inject income directly into the community.
Click here for images and a video summary of this unique and special event.