How We Work

For the past 40 years LifeLine Ekurhuleni (previously known as LifeLine East Rand) has been a leading provider of personal skills development and promotion of emotional wellness for the healing and transformation of individuals and communities.  LifeLine’s service specialization is the provision of personal growth/life skills, lay counselling, trauma support and counselling, victim empowerment services, HIV and AIDS, civilian oversight and intermediary services.

LifeLine Ekurhuleni was established out of a need for community members to have access to a 24-hour telephonic service that could assist them to address the emotional and social stress and trauma they were struggling to deal with.  Annually approximately 3 600 people accessed telephonic and face to face counselling services from LifeLine Ekurhuleni.

In support of the changes brought about by the new South African Government, LifeLine Ekurhuleni expanded its services to offer outreach services at clinics, correctional institutions and schools across the Ekurhuleni Region in order to provide services to communities who had historically not had access to them.  These outreach services have grown to include the use of two mobile counselling units that take lay counselling services into informal settlements or peri-rural areas that do not have the infrastructure to house any form of social services.  For many of the communities, LifeLine Ekurhuleni is their only direct access to lay counselling services.  LifeLine has service points in Tsakane, Daveyton and Vosloorus townships.

LifeLine’s victim empowerment and trauma support and counselling services include intake and adult counselling at Ikhaya Lokhuselo the Regional Victims Office in Duduza and we are the residential counselling service provider at Ikhaya Lethemba One Stop Centre for victims of crime and violence situated in Braamfontein.  LifeLine also assists child victims of rape, sexual assault and witness to homicide to testify in court via an intermediary worker.  LifeLine intermediary workers facilitate intermediary sessions at Benoni, Boksburg, Vosloorus, Germiston, Kempton Park and Tembisa Courts.  800 children were assisted to testify via an intermediary worker during 2009.

LifeLine also provides pre and post test HIV counselling to inmates in 3 prisons in the region (Modderbee, Boksburg and Nigel Prisons) and provides supervision and training to volunteers based at 11 police station based victim support centres.

LifeLine Ekurhuleni runs a civilian oversight project, “the Monitoring Project”, where we monitor the condition of children detained in 88 police station holding cells across the Gauteng Province.    During the 2009 financial year 4996 children were detained in police holding cells across the Province.   LifeLine is receiving a merit award for this project from the Impumelelo Award Fund.

LifeLine Ekurhuleni is also a recognized capacity building organisation who is contracted by government, the corporate sector and civil society to provide training in emotional wellness, life skills, HIV and AIDS and victim empowerment.

LifeLine Ekurhuleni strives to improve the quality of life by facilitating emotional wellness and offering courses in self-awareness, communication and life skills.  As a community- based, civil society organisation whose core services are provided by volunteers, LifeLine Ekurhuleni involves the community at large and its resources to achieve its objectives.