Blog
The August school holiday is a welcome break for children across Mwiki, but for many households it also creates a real, practical challenge: parents and guardians who work through the day now need to figure out where children spend their time safely and productively for several weeks straight. This year, One Vision CBO organised a modest but deliberate set of holiday activities aimed at filling some of that gap constructively, without pretending to replace a parent's own arrangements or a school's structured curriculum.
Why the Holiday Gap Matters
For households with two working parents, or a single parent managing income alone, the school holiday period often means either an older sibling taking on informal childcare duties, a young child spending long unsupervised hours at home, or a scramble to find affordable holiday care that many Mwiki families simply can't budget for. None of these are ideal, and each carries its own risks — from safety concerns to children simply losing the routine and stimulation that term-time provides.
We don't have the resources to solve this gap for every family in Mwiki, but even a partial, well-designed set of activities can meaningfully reduce the number of children left with no engaging, safe options during the break.
What the Holiday Programme Included
Our August holiday activities centred on the Mwiki Community Centre grounds and included supervised reading and homework catch-up sessions for younger children, a short introductory digital literacy taster for older children curious about the kind of skills taught in our main Youth Digital Skills & Vocational Training Programme, and a joint activity with our environmental team involving tree seedling care at some of our recent planting sites.
Sessions were kept deliberately low-cost and simple to organise — this wasn't an elaborate holiday camp with expensive materials, but a structured, supervised space where children could spend a few productive hours several times during the break.
Volunteers Made This Possible
None of this would have been feasible without volunteers stepping forward specifically for the holiday period — including several older Youth Digital Skills Programme graduates who volunteered to lead the digital literacy taster sessions themselves, closing a small but meaningful loop between our programmes. Watching a young person who benefited from our youth programme turn around and mentor even younger children during their own school break was one of the more quietly rewarding parts of running this initiative.
We're grateful to every volunteer who gave up part of their own holiday time to make this happen, and to the parents and guardians who trusted us with their children's time during the break.
What We're Considering for Future Holidays
This was a relatively modest first attempt at structured holiday programming, and we're already gathering feedback from participating families on what worked and what could be improved for the next school break. Ideas already raised include extending session hours slightly to better match a full working day, and involving more local businesses in offering short, practical skill demonstrations to older children during future holiday periods.
Balancing Structure With Genuine Rest
It's worth acknowledging a real tension in holiday programming: children need genuine rest and unstructured play time during a break from term-time routine, not simply a different flavour of structured activity every day. We tried to be mindful of this balance, keeping sessions relatively short and optional rather than demanding full-day attendance, so that participating families could treat our activities as a helpful supplement to their own holiday plans rather than a replacement for a child's own need for downtime and free play.
Finding this balance well is something we're still learning, and feedback from parents on whether we struck the right note between structure and rest will directly shape how we approach the next school holiday period.
A Small Investment With Compounding Value
A few weeks of structured, low-cost holiday activity might seem modest against the scale of challenges facing Mwiki's families, and in isolation, it is. But we've come to believe that these smaller, more manageable interventions — done consistently and well, holiday after holiday — accumulate into something more significant over time than any single grand initiative could achieve on its own, particularly for children who benefit from consistent, positive engagement with their community throughout their whole childhood, not just during term time.
Thinking About Sustainability of This Effort
Running holiday activities well requires volunteer availability precisely during a period when many of our regular volunteers are also managing their own family holiday plans, which has made scheduling more challenging than our regular monthly commitments. We're thinking carefully about how to build a more resilient, slightly larger volunteer base specifically for holiday periods, so this initiative can grow in scope over successive school breaks without depending too heavily on the same small group of people each time.
We're also exploring whether a modest, appropriate fee for higher-cost activities in future holiday programming might allow us to expand what we can offer without depending entirely on donated time and materials, while remaining mindful of keeping any such programme genuinely accessible to every interested family regardless of their ability to pay.
If you'd like your child to take part in future holiday activities, or you're interested in volunteering during the next school break, reach out to info@onevisioncbo.site or visit us at the Mwiki Community Centre.