How it all began

121@VMA was the seed sown in the heart of Lizette Venter, a project management consultant who wanted to make a difference in her community. Together with Ian Stuart, pastor of the Pretoria North Baptist church, Lizette began to network and explore the viability of various ideas and projects over a period of several years.

The dream of a youth drop-in centre, (2004)
Their first dream was to open a drop-in centre in Pretoria North where young people could come after school or on weekends and spend time in an environment that was safe and also conducive to personal development. Such a centre would have resources available on a variety of issues facing young people, as well as people on hand to counsel, tutor or mentor them. It would be a hub where various youth organizations could run programs and courses on issues relevant to young people.

For a variety of reasons, this centre never came off the ground. This was a point of major frustration for Lizette and Ian, who had a variety of resources and programs available, and had already started networking with a number of youth organizations in the area. They then thought to bring their programs, resources and network to where the youth already are: the schools.

Six months of strategising, (August 2005)
Following this decision, Cori Wielenga and Rene Jobse joined the team, and what followed was six months of intense strategizing and thinking around a product to take to the schools. The central issues were that we didn’t want to duplicate what was already out there and we didn’t want to offer a product that didn’t address the schools actual need.

It needs to be remembered at this point that all five of us in the team were (and are) working on a part-time, voluntary, basis, and that 121@VMA had no office or facilities. Meetings were held at one of our homes or else over coffee in restaurants.

The Year of Grace
We came up with a product we called the ‘Year of Grace’ (YoG) which was largely a whole school development program based on Christian principles and thinking. It would include an intensive analysis on every level of the school community (management, parents, staff, learners) to ascertain exactly what the needs were. This would be followed by workshopping with key stakeholders in the school to come up with a joint solution to these needs. We would ‘project manage’ the implementation of this solution but by and large it would need to be carried out by those in the school community in order to ensure sustainability.

The Pilot Project, (January, 2006)
We decided to pilot the project in one high school in Pretoria North to test our idea, in 2006. We spoke with a few principals of various schools, and one principal agreed with enthusiasm that we could pilot the project at his school.

Almost immediately, several of the pitfalls of our model became apparent. The central pitfall is that we had not planned for the time-consuming and contentious issue of staff buy-in, assuming this would be taken care of by school management. Carrying out the initial phase of analysing the school became a near-impossible process without the full support of the staff. At the end of the first three-month term of the school year, when we had expected to have analysed every level of the school community, we had only been able to analyse the learners who were on detention and the leaders of the school.

Changing Focus, (April, 2006)
When we assessed the situation in April we decided that as we had only been able to analyse those two groups (the leaders and the detention learners), perhaps we needed to focus our energies one those two groups. Lizette and Ian presented the results of our findings to the school board, and also gave an outline of a possible program we could offer to both these two groups of learners.

The decision of the school was that we could take over the detention program. That was all. From a whole school development program at which those in the school community would be responsible for developing their own solutions, we were now left with needing to run a program for the detention classes on Monday afternoons.

However, this coincided with Hettie Orffer joining our team. Hettie had already done some work in offering personal development programs to young people. She was prepared to develop material for the purposes of running the detention program.

The Constructive Detention Program, (June, 2006)
By June, 2006, when we reassessed the situation, Hettie had informed us that several schools in Pretoria East were interested in having us run our detention program there as well. Suddenly, we were making the shift from the Year of Grace to running detention programs in high schools.

Coinciding with this was our coming into contact with some youth workers in Soshanguve who were looking for support in running personal development programs in schools there. Although we weren’t yet ready to make the shift from what our initial product had been to this new product, it was becoming more and more obvious that the one product we had ready and which was in demand was what we decided to call the Constructive Detention Program (CDP). Especially when in July, another five schools, primary and high, indicated interest in the CDP.