The first houses were built in 2005, the first children were taken in and the first employees were hired in the THABANG Children’s project. Today, the project, managed by Tessa White, is a well-established and well-known institution in Limpopo. As the “Child and Youth Care enter” registered by the Department of Social Development it now looks after 32 children and runs a counseling centre in the “Smash Block” corrugated iron housing estate. More than 20,000 people live there, and poverty, unemployment and HIV are widespread.
THABANG currently supplies about 300 households there and about 45 children in the Thabang Drop-In-Crentre, an afternoon care service for schoolchildren.

The Thabang Children’s Home Trust was founded in August 2004 with the financial support of the German business man Egon Mauss. Under the palm of the Trust project work started. The first phase was pioneering footwork in the informal settlement of Smash Block with over 20.000 people living under very poor circumstances. Thanks to the initiative of the Thabang Children’s Home Trust a local day clinic was established in June 2005 close to the Thabang Community Care Centre.

In 2005 the Juvenile Centre/ Place of Safety (later: Child &Youth Care Centre) was opened on the road outside Thabazimbi. This Centre caters for boys who are ‘in need of care and protection’ in terms of the Children’s Act of 38/2005.

In 2006 the Thabang Children’s Place of Safety for girls started on the farm Roodedam.

In 2007 the provincial government of Limpopo officially registered Thabang’s two Places of Safety and named them “Child and Youth Care Centres” run by Thabang Children’s Home Trust.

In 2010, A Drop in Centre was opened at the Community Care Centre in Smash Block. Here, the orphaned and vulnerable children form the informal settlement can receive daily after- school support, before returning to their guardians within the settlement. This Centre is about 35km away from the Thabang Child & Youth Care Centre.

In 2016, after receiving a generous donor who built the girls’ Home/Centre on the site of the boy’s Centre, the two Child & Youth Care Centres amalgamated onto one site- on the R511 road outside of Thabazimbi. This allows for better management and cost savings.