Volmoed Youth weekly update: 27 April–2 May 2026

In six weeks’ time, when VYLTP starts our 10th anniversary celebrations under the theme “I call you friends” (John 15), I will have written this weekly update for a full year. It has become a wonderful discipline.

One of the reasons I started writing it is because we launched the 10/10/10 campaign to assist with the sustainability of this Youth programme. We asked people across the globe and locally to celebrate our 10th anniversary with us by donating R10/$10/€10/£10 for 10 months. To read more about this, please see our 10/10/10 page. The easiest platform to use is GlobalGiving but of course there are others (e.g. PayPal).

Many of you started doing that, and more, and we can only thank you very very much for this. We will keep this campaign going until the end of this year, especially as August to December tend to be difficult months for us (in terms of cashflow). Please feel free to share this with others. We are not at the point of sustainability yet…. But (with your and God’s help) we’ll get there….

In this week, I was inspired to write down 10 ways in which this programme is unique. Please feel free to read it on this blog. I also experimented by putting this on some other social media platforms (eg LinkedIn) and look forward to seeing what the effect of that might be.

Good news for the week! Indiphile received his French visa, and he and Mahalia will leave for France on 9 May. We will help him to do final preparations this coming week. Thank you to those who are supporting him.

May 9 is also the day when we host our next Taizé day at Volmoed. Those who wish to attend must please register at https://forms.gle/Cd57iyEjZAiznY679. Thank you to those who assisted us with setting up these links and creating a poster.

On a different note: As part of our preparation for the uGood research project on Transgenerational wellness, some of us went to a creative archival project of the University of the Western Cape in Woodstock, Cape Town. This was a real eye-opener and also a great way to meet some of the students and other young people we will be working with over the next 2 years. This project also involves young people from Ghana and Tanzania.

The BEST thing (for me and for the mission of VYLTP) that happened this week was a meeting I had with some young adults from the local Anglican parish. Some of them will come to the Taize day on May 9 and some will attend the 10th anniversary celebrations. One of them plays the violin and she hopes to accompany the singing of the Taizé songs. I hope to also meet some young people from other congregations in town and have invited them to attend our celebrations. It is important that we build a bridge between them and our current cohort on our programme so that we are not disconnected from the local faith communities.

As a result of the recent Village news article, one of the local farms have now invited us to do some drumming at the local space agency (yes, we have one!) on 13 May. And on 24 May, judge Elizabeth Stong from New York will run the Cape Town marathon in our honour and will ask people to support her per mile or per kilometre to support us. Thank you for this honour, your honor! Our local and global connections continue to be strengthened. We are the very definition of “glocal”. May it continue!

Edwin Arrison (VYLTP Director)
edwin@volmoedyouth.org.za