Monday, 11 October 2010 16:38

Zakheni is a vibrant young NGO run by an energetic team of Drama and Art Therapists. Their approach is to use the creative arts, storytelling and play to facilitate growth and transformation in vulnerable groups.

Zakheni was founded in 2002, and over the last 8 years we have worked within a number of sectors nationally, predominantly with children affected by HIV.

We developed our FireMaker Project as a result of this work to address the large number of children left vulnerable through HIV/AIDS, poverty and conflict. FireMaker is a year long workshopping process, which equips child and youth care workers with creative skills in offering psychosocial support to vulnerable children.

Working with careworkers raised our consciousness around the often neglected population of careworkers and the high levels of burnout in this population.  In response to this we developed the Wellbeing Workshop, which is a 3 day intervention designed to develop awareness in self care and provide ongoing supervision and mentorship to careworkers.

We have also launched a Schools Project which aims to address the issue of school based violence through running Drama and Dramatherapy groups in 5 schools on the Cape Flats. For more information visit 'Projects' on our site.

We are excited to announce that we have recently been awarded National Lottery Funding which is enabling us to expand our operation and offer our services to more organizations. With this funding, we are inviting NPOs in the carework arena, who are keen to deepen their creative approach to working with children and address staff wellbeing, to tender for one of our intervention programmes. You can email us on This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

The Lottery funding also allows us to grow exponentially from an human resource perspective and open 3 new posts: Operations manager, Administrator and a Project Manager Internship. Individuals that would like to apply for these posts should visit the website to view the job descriptions and send their CV by email to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .