Living the dream — Philisa Young Minds Academy for early learning opens in CT

There are few things more formidable in the civil society space than a woman with a dream. Lucinda Evans, feminist activist and founder of the Cape Town non-profit organisation Philisa Abafazi Bethu, is living proof of this.

Evans started her organisation in 2008, aiming to protect and empower abused women, children and LGBTQIA+ individuals. At the time, she ran it out of the dining room and garage of her home in Lavender Hill, opening her first safe house in her backyard.

Over the next decade, as support for her efforts grew, so did Philisa Abafazi Bethu. In 2020, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, the organisation opened the Philisa Abafazi Bethu Women and Family Centre in Retreat, transforming an empty plot of land into a safe haven for the community’s most vulnerable members.

Now, a new frontier of Evans’ dream has been reached – the Philisa Young Minds Academy, an early childhood development (ECD) centre with the capacity to take on up to 100 children, officially opened on Wednesday, 25 March 2026.

“We cannot lead if we haven’t served. Servant leadership is going to change the world, and it’s in our collective hearts,” said Evans at the opening ceremony, where she wore all purple in honour of International Women’s Month.

Chance to heal

The centre, which was constructed with the support of Coca-Cola Peninsula Beverages and the Rotary Club of Newlands, has 70 children across four classrooms, with plans to expand as additional specialist support services become available.

Other organisations that have assisted with supporting Philisa Abafazi Bethu’s facilities in Retreat included Breadline Africa and Corobrik.

This is an ECD centre with a difference. Evans’ background in combatting gender-based violence and abuse means she is looking beyond early learning objectives, to providing children who have been exposed to traumatic events with the space to “settle their nervous systems”.

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She described children as primary victims of gender-based violence, even if they are not always acknowledged as such.

“Our ECD centre is going to be benchmarked as an early intervention programme, where we particularly look at how to address gender-based violence with a three-year-old. Naturally, we’ve told children: ‘This is my body. Don’t touch my body.’ And we say to children, ‘If somebody touches your body, you must tell.’

“But we have not carried these messages through in ECD centres... because in most centres, we are not paying attention to children’s behaviour,” said Evans.

She noted that behavioural issues in children were often only picked up once they entered primary school, and added that those children who bullied others were sometimes victims within the home.

“I want to say unapologetically that a three-year-old’s first bully is an unhealed parent… The first violence… already happened within the womb, when one parent did something to the other parent – and it’s not just physical violence that we’re speaking about,” she said.

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“ECD is focused on children’s need to read and write, to know the colours and shapes, and this too will happen. But you also want to give that same child’s soul, heart and narrative a second chance.”

Enormous opportunity

It’s estimated that more than one million children aged three to five are not attending any form of early learning programme. John Winship from the Rotary Club of Newlands said the “need was enormous”, but so was the opportunity for change.

“What I feel quite positive about is that there’s enormous understanding in the government, in the provinces, through NGOs and so on, that a collective effort is needed to start addressing these things. And it would appear that there’s an attitude change starting to take place, which is: ‘How can we facilitate the registration [of ECD centres]?’” he said.

Winship spotlighted the “R99-per-month campaign” linked to the Philisa Young Minds Academy, which encourages donors to contribute a monthly amount to cover the food and other costs of a child’s attendance at the centre.

“We’ve got 54 [contributors] so far, mostly through the Rotary [Club] and our connections,” he said.

Coca-Cola Peninsula Beverages has been providing Philisa Abafazi Bethu with support since 2019, when it co-funded the building of the family centre. Charl Goncalves, managing director of the company, said that involvement in community upliftment projects was strongly aligned to its organisational purpose.

“A key focus of our corporate social investment initiatives is education, and in particular, foundational learning,” he said.

“We hold a firm belief in the ability of business to play a role in contributing to the change we want to see in the world, and the opportunity to partner on projects like this supports how we turn that belief into action.”

Evans emphasised that gender-based violence was a national disaster in SA, adding that by the time interventions reached victims at the age of 18 or beyond, it was already “almost too late”.

“Our goal is to help children process and relate to traumatic experiences in a safe environment, while also empowering them to speak up if they are being harmed. We want to prevent children from becoming silent victims of violence and ensure they feel safe enough to report abuse, even to a teacher or trusted adult,” she said. DM