Hi there

You may not know me but my name is Stefan Kunze.  I am a 28 year old German and I work for an incredible organisation in South Africa called WhizzKids United (WKU) that uses the power of football to help fight HIV and AIDS among young people.  I manage the Programmes Team and get to travel all over the country implementing life saving programmes.  I am truly passionate about this work ...

This year I am running my first marathon, the Berlin Marathon, and will be raising funds for WKU along the way.  We believe that working together we can do more so I am recruiting an international team of citizen activists who are running the Berlin Marathon to help me.  Together I hope that we can raise 4000 Euros.  If I recruit 10 people, that means 400 Euro each.  If I recruit 20 people, that means 200 Euro each.  The more activists join me, the easier it will be to reach our collective target !!!

So how can we do it?  It's actually very easy.  WKU is linked to an online giving page called givengain.com which aims to link activists like us to causes like WKU.  All you have to do is:

1. Sign up as an activist here: (this takes two minutes and can be done through Facebook)
2. Follow instructions to complete your profile
3. To select a project beneficiary, go to the "Projects" tab, search for Africaid WhizzKids United and select it as your cause
4. Under the "Benficiary Program" heading, select "WhizzKids United - Berlin Marathon"
5. Fill in the other fields.  Its completely your choice as to how much you would like to raise however as a fundraising team I hope we can collectively raise 4000 Euro, so about 300 - 500 Euro each would be a good number to start with.  Remember, the more activists the less each one of us needs to raise to reach our target !!!
6. Share your efforts with your friends through social media (facebook, twitter, etc) and ask them to contribute to your cause. 

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at stefan@africaid.org.za or you can catch me on skype, my name is der_steps.  I will keep you informed every step of the way as we go on this journey together.

Two of our Life Skills trainers in Rustenburg, Elsie and Moeketsi, took some time this week to give you a little insight into their work and tell you about the experience they had with WhizzKids United:

For the first day when we started the programme it was little difficult because it was something new to the learners as well as the teachers. Up until we explained to them that the aim of the programme is to teach life skills compared to football skills. We explained that, the reason why we chose football is because football is understood by many people and it is the game where goals should be set in order to win which in life is to set goals in order to achieve at last. In this manner they began to understand and things started to be easy for both learners, teachers and us as well. Now the programme seems fun and empowering at the same time. Thanks to you guys.

From Elsie and Moeketsi

On the 22nd April, our UK Programme Manager Karl Hankinson was invited at the request of HIV Sport to present a workshop at the ′Sport & Globilisation Conference′ in the North East of England. The conference was an opportunity for individuals and organisations within the area to learn about different approaches to sport and development; and to see how sport can be used as a vehicle for change. The conference aimed to highlight the different ways sport is used in UK projects, and look at how it is being utilised in the lead up to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

Karl said: "It was a good opportunity to bring together different organisations and trade ideas of how we all use sport in our different ways to tackle social issues. There was great interest in Africaid′s work, particularly how the lessons we have learnt in South Africa are now being transferred to worthwhile communities here in the UK. Conferences such as this offer a great platform to raise the profile of the excellent work we are doing out in South Africa."

When we re-designed our Website in 2009 we were hoping, that the website would help us to spread the word about WhizzKids in the world. And thanks to Google and its analysing tools, we now have the approval that the website fulfills its purpose.

Since the launch in November 2009 we had more than 2 500 people coming to www.whizzkidsunited.org and more than 17 000 pages have been viewed.

And the website is a worldwide success: our visitors came from 100 different countries (Slovakia was number 100) or 1069 different cities.

A big thanks you goes to everybody who visits our website and helps to make WhizzKids even more famous all over the globe.

You can also follow us on facebook by joining the WhizzKids United group.

If you visit our website regularly, you might have the feeling that some of the content is missing - and you are right. Our website was attacked by hackers last week for the second time in three months and unfortunately the attackers found a security hole in our database and managed to delete content from our database.
The good news is that we know what they deleted and that we are working on recovering these contents, like news articles, staff profiles and photo galleries. So the website should be good as new very soon.

On another note, we have recently changed our mailing procedure for the newsletter which now only takes us two minutes instead of two days (what a difference). Plus, we will change our newsletter to entirely HTML format in the future. If you should have the feeling that you don′t understand a word... it simply means, that the newsletter will become a lot more user-friendly.

If you wish to send feedback on our website, please feel free to email me at stefan@africaid.org.za.

Today is Matthias′ birthday. The entire WhizzKids United team wishes him all the best for his future and an enjoyable time with us, here in Durban. He turns 24 today, but he still looks a lot like 23.

Happy Birthday again to you, Matthias.

Hi everybody,

I am Stefan, the first volunteer who returned to WhizzKids United. As Oli is on his well deserved holidays, I will have the pleasure to write this week′s blog and to share some of my first impressions with you.

I have been with WhizzKids United before. That was in August 2007 for six months and it always was my dream to come back to South Africa since I left in February 2008. And so far, I do not regret that I returned. There was a very warm welcoming for me when I arrived and I really felt that everybody else was just as happy for me to be back as myself.

My job is pretty much the same like in 2007. I am programme coordinator, which means that I work a lot in the field, closely with our trainers and try to keep everything running smoothly at the ground. The big difference compared to 2007 is the change of the working conditions. There is the office now, which allows a far better and more professional working atmosphere than we used to have it in our "dinning room" at Clark Road. Plus there is a lot more staff (at times there was only Marcus and me two years ago) and a very clear structure. I remember Marcus always laughed at me in 2007 when I spoke about the need of better structures and - big surprise - now it came alive. All in all I really like it.

At last, I′d like to add that whoever finds a spelling mistake in my text may keep it!

Cheers
Stefan