Our Vision for Change
Our Beach Hubs and trained community surf mentors create a safe space where children who are identified as “at-risk” are referred to find belonging, learn new skills, build confidence, and create positive behaviours toward mental wellness.
Our Mission
To increase access to child and youth friendly community based mental health services in under resourced communities
Our Goal
At a time when children’s brains are still flexible, our Surf Therapy service, provides supportive and caring relationships, key to reshaping the brain and responses to stress during adolescence.
- Evidence-driven Surf Therapy across five flagship sites in South Africa.
- Robust external research to generate learning to share with the sector.
- Best practice training and mentoring to support increased access to physical activity based, mental health and well-being promotion services across low and middle income countries.
We Value
The children and young people we work with are at the core of what we do. With them, we’ve created a set of values to drive our strategy and day-to-day interactions.
Bananas
The W4C culture promotes protecting each other from harm, respecting each other equally, and open communication – always, anytime, anywhere!
Well-being
We want to increase understanding of mental health and the core pillars of programmes that improve emotional, mental, and physical well-being of people in under-resourced communities.
People First
Our programme focuses on the developmental and health needs of children and young people, whose well-being is our first priority.
Diversity
Every person in the W4C family experiences acceptance and belonging. No matter what they look like, where they come from, what they believe in, or what they can do.
Participate and Collaborate
Children, coaches, and community participate in developing the Waves for Change model of learning, and we participate in the wider networks and communities of practice to support increasing access to high-quality youth well-being programmes.
Be Transparent
We share how we source and spend money and how we make collective decisions by ensuring anyone can ask questions, raise concerns, and give feedback.
Safety
By maintaining physical and psychological safety, children feel understood and accepted, supported when they try news things, and can have fun being a child!
How it all started: Isiqalo
Waves for Change grew from voluntary weekend surfing sessions run at Muizenberg Beach, Cape Town, by founders Apish Tshetsha and Tim Conibear. Early research into the surfing sessions highlighted the valuable psycho-social support that was otherwise unavailable to the participants.
Understanding that the key to Waves for Change lay in mobilising passionate youth coaches, Waves for Change worked with universities and mental health practitioners to refine a coach training programme, pragmatic evaluation tools and a codified curriculum to leverage the social and emotional learning offered by surfing.
Founded as the Isiqalo Foundation Trust, Waves for Change delivers Surf Therapy courses through a network of South African Beach Hubs. Outside of South Africa, Waves for Change shares its training, curriculum and evaluation tools with an international network of partners: The Wave Alliance.
Surf Therapy with Mental Health at our core
Over the last ten years, Waves for Change has worked with community stakeholders, local and international universities, and referral partners to design and deliver a cost-effective and inclusive youth-focused well-being service. At the heart of our programme are youth from the same or similar contexts to our participants, who we recruit based on their values and commitment to being change-makers in their community. We support their work as surf therapy coaches by investing in their skills and understanding, and providing the resources – such as transport, lesson plans, surfboards, on-going management, and access to psychologists – they need to deliver impactful surf therapy sessions.
Our Supporters
Frequently Asked Questions
Do you take volunteers at Waves for Change?
Unfortunately, we do not currently take on volunteers to deliver our surf therapy programme or interact with our participants. Our model focuses on supporting and enabling local youth to deliver a sustainable surf therapy service to children from their community. The participants who we serve also need consistent and stable interactions with caring mentors who they can relate to and from healthy connections with. Volunteers from outside of the communities we work for unfortunately do not fit into this model, and we are unable to provide a volunteer experience that is meaningful and impactful for both our participants and volunteers.
Can I apply to do an internship at Waves for Change?
We do take interns to support our Monitoring, Evaluation, Research and Learning, office operations, marketing and communications. If you have relevant skills in these fields and can offer a mid/long-term commitment to supporting our work, please send through your CV and motivation letter.
The Monitoring, Evaluation, Research and Learning department, ask for the following requirements:
- Postgraduate qualification in any field related to community development and social sciences
- Qualitative and Quantitative research skills
The following skills are particularly useful for the marketing and fundraising department:
- Copyediting
- Marketing content designs
- Graphic design
I would like to apply to be a surf mentor, but I do not know how to surf. Can I still apply?
Yes, you can apply.
If you are a young person from the communities that W4C works in (Cape Town: Muizenberg, Monwabisi, Hout Bay; Eastern Cape: Gqeberha and East London) and you would be interested in becoming a W4C surf mentor, you do not need to know how to surf prior to applying.
How can I arrange a visit to any Waves for Change site?
Before visiting any of our five sites, please ensure that you first contact our programme manager to make an appointment.
I am a journalist/photographer interested in visiting Waves for Change.
We do not grant close and personal contact to the participants. If media contact is focusing on coaches, coaches must be properly informed of the project in order to provide informed consent. You may not ask personal questions of the coaches or leading questions to probe if a coach or participant has suffered any form of abuse.
Get a Child to the Beach
Just a ripple can make waves and change lives through surfing and child-friendly mental health.
