A Home and residential care for Mentally Disabled

We have a volunteer programme where ordinary families take in people, unrelated to them, with mental illness to go live with them. This is part of a Community Reintegration model that the Spring Foundation in Partnership with Lentegeur Psychiatric Hospital in the Western Cape South Africa. The mental health users usually have usually been rejected by their families due to them having a mental illness. Sometimes the families of these residents have died or they have aged and are unable to continue to provide the level of care and support required by the mentally ill person. The volunteer families take in the person to live with them until they are able to be reintegrated with their biological families or they remain with the families until they die. Each resident receives only R2200 Disability Grant which is the equivalent of USD $122.30 or 96.80 Pounds per month. The care giver receives R530 per month per patient which is equal to $29.46. The patient's Disability Grant goes toward their food & Refreshments, transport, clothing, laundry services, the utilities like water and electricity they use. They also have to pay their Funeral Policies and receive pocket money from the $122.30. The only compensation for the carer is $29.46 per month. The work they do is spectacular but many of our Rose Parents have passed away and we are only left with 5 remaining Rose Parent Homes. In our quest to recruit more Rose Parents we are often told that the families who are interested are unable to provide for an additional person in their household with only the small amounts of money our current Rose Parents and Residents Receive. We have thus come up with a model that we want to trial where we will purchase a house and pilot a residential facility with only 4 residents and to have a paid caregiver live in the house with them. For this we require R8800 ($489.16) + the Disability Grant per month. This would be sufficient to pay their accommodation, transportation, clothing, meals, extra mural activities and supervision & care each month. In order for us to become a licensed group home we require to pilot this project for approximately three years in order for us to be able to also complete the registration process with the Department of Health. We currently know of 4 females at Lentegeur Psychiatric Hospital who are treatment resistant but have previously lived with one of our Rose Parents and unfortunately the Rose Parent's personal circumstances changed and the residents were returned to Lentegeur Hospital as they had nowhere else to go. They have been turned down by a number of group homes and we have seen that they are able to cope in the community if they will only be given an opportunity. I would like to appeal to you to please assist us with funding for the 3 years to get this project off the ground. We would also require R1650000 ($91,716.90) to purchase a property for these ladies to live in. In total we require $162,155.48 for the project to run for three years. As we observe success in the project we will continue to source funding for the project. We also require R2500 ($ 1,667.58) per month for each our existing Rose Parent Care giver. This would make it possible for more people to become Rose Parent Families if they will receive the necessary incentive. This will allow us to increase our existing total of 6 carers to 10 carers and it will cost us R900 000 ($ 50,027.40) over a period of 3 years to compensate 10 carers.
I sincerely hope that our request will cause someone to assist the Spring Foundation Rose Parent Project. The Spring Foundation have had Clean audits for as long as it is in existence and we will account for every Rand spent. We can provide monthly reports of activities with evidence of progress being made. We will feature your name on our Facebook page, newsletters and our website.