Cause Index

Lefika La Phodiso

Our programmes intend to provide a safe space to extend learning, play and creativity, through the arts, in a collaborative supportive environment using art-based methods. This promotes empathic engagement.
Lefika La Phodiso, 'The Rock of Holding,' is Africa's first psychoanalytically informed Community Art Counselling Training Institute. Lefika is based at the Children's Memorial Institute in Gauteng. Since 1996, Lefika has responded to the impact of trauma and loss associated to apartheid, HIV and AIDS, violence and socio-economic disparities. Lefika's primary objective has been to create accessible mental health services in under resourced communities. This has been achieved by building capacity through training community arts practitioners, artists, educators and mental health workers in creative analytic group work, bringing together art therapy approaches, trauma work and group practice. Through specialised skills development within a SETA accredited training programme, Community Art Counsellors are able to facilitate community outreach projects in and around the inner city of Johannesburg, in rural areas - in schools, hospitals, community centres, NGO's etc. Responding to International social justice and psychosocial mental health needs, Lefika now reaches communities across South Africa and abroad.

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