Our

HISTORY

Tremendous Hearts was conceived by Marilyn Votaw in response to the orphan and vulnerable children (OVC) crisis in South Africa. Tremendous Hearts' mission is to provide highly-skilled volunteers who commit to a year or more of service to South African children' homes and other agencies that care for orphans and vulnerable children. Our aim is to improve the standard of care in children's homes and to increase the number of children who are able to transition to foster, adoptive or extended family care. We provide eligible volunteers with sponsorships so that all who want to serve are able to volunteer regardless of their financial circumstances.

In late 2005, Marilyn felt a call to the mission field and began a discernment process to clarify where and whom she would serve.  During this exploration process Marilyn saw an Oprah show about the then 15 million children across the world that had been orphaned or made vulnerable by HIV/AIDS.  Oprah said something that settled on Marilyn’s heart and began to keep her up at night -- “Just think about what our world will be like when these children grow up having had no one to love them or care for them.”  Initially, Marilyn thought she would pack up her life and just go.  However, after some reflection, she decided to begin by identifying a month-long project in Sub Saharan Africa to explore working directly with OVC.  After doing extensive research on the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the volunteer opportunities available, Marilyn took her first trip to South Africa in July 2006 and volunteered at the Baphumelele Children’s Home in the Khayelitsha township of Cape Town.

While at Baphumelele, Marilyn worked in the “baby house” assisting the isiXhosa-speaking care-givers by doing laundry, brushing teeth, and making bottles for and playing with the 40 infants and children under four in their care.  Marilyn had the opportunity to observe the effect of short-term volunteers on the children and staff.  Most of her fellow volunteers were on their gap year and, while well meaning, had no professional skills, were emotionally immature and needed significant supervision.  She also observed the toll that a rotating team of short-term volunteers took on the children who had already experienced so many broken attachments in their young lives.

In addition, since Baphumelele was fortunate to have four older, more mature long-term volunteers including an accountant and a marketing specialist, Marilyn was able to observe their very positive effect on Baphumelele’s development as an organization.  With the support of its long-term volunteers, Baphumelele had enough resources to do more than shelter, clothe and feed their children.  They had a volunteer medical team who managed the anti-retroviral regimens for the HIV positive children.  They had a staff social worker who ensured that the children had birth certificates and were legally in the care of the orphanage and, most importantly, was able to focus on family reunification and other outplacement options whenever possible.

As she worked directly with the children and staff at Baphumelele, Marilyn felt her call to serve these courageous South Africans solidify.  She resolved to return with professionally skilled, emotionally mature, long-term volunteers to improve the standard of care and increase the odds that OVC in residential care would be reunited with extended family, or placed in foster or adoptive families.

Beginning in 2006, Marilyn, dedicated herself full time to realizing her vision for Tremendous Hearts.  For the first three years, she did this while also working in a full-time position at Harvard, a job that she left only two weeks before moving to South Africa in July 2009.

Tremendous Hearts, traveled to Cape Town in August 2007 to conduct a needs assessment of and begin to form relationships with local children's homes and other OVC-supporting organizations. With Marilyn were her mother, Joye Dickens who is also a psychotherapist; and Meredith Crowley, a filmmaker.  Together they visited more than on 22 children’s homes and OVC and volunteer centered agencies and came away from this rich and extraordinary experience with a much-needed, deeper understanding of the very complex OVC landscape in Cape Town as well as some very important relationships that would make the next steps possible. Meredith also shot the footage needed to make a short film called A Tremendous Heart.

During 2008, Marilyn and Joye formed the Board of Directors and established Tremendous Hearts as a non-profit organization.  Marilyn also established a partnership with Home From Home (HFH), a local non-profit that provided cluster foster care in and around Cape Town, which would allow her to relocate to Cape Town and continue developing the Tremendous Hearts model while also serving as a capacity building volunteer for HFH.

Using her own relocation to and volunteer experience in Cape Town as a guide, Marilyn has continued to develop the Tremendous Hearts model.  Since her arrival in Cape Town in mid-2009, she has assisted HFH with a number of capacity building projects that will enable them to expand to the Eastern Cape and increase their capacity by 75% by the end of 2011.

Tremendous Hearts is now actively recruiting volunteers and developing partnerships with children’s homes and other agencies in and around Cape Town.