A Study of Shelters for Street Children from an Organizational ...

perspectives, understanding, and capacity to identify the needs of children living and/or
working on the streets. Identifying children's needs and the capacity to meet them is
enormous challenge to shelters and staff. Not every need is met, particularly where it
involves financial resources. Children's views ranged within children's needs as
individuals, the challenges in their families and communities of origin. They felt that
intervention programs should include programs that eliminated the circumstances of
violence and abuse within the family and community, the chances of substance abuse,
development of good parenting and communication between the children and their
guardians, creating chances for their continuation with education, skills development
which would open opportunities for employment.
6.1.1 Conclusions Regarding the Background Theories
The study found it practical to use organisational and social exclusion theories (chapter
one) as the guiding framework. Shelters as organisations, intervention and
reintegration programs are derived from concerns with the plight of children living
and/or working on the streets. Children are deprived and socially excluded categories
within society, living and/or working on the streets further compound and complicate
their social exclusion. Consequently organisational structures of the shelters were
found to be crucial components in effecting intervention and reintegration programs. In
this regard, shelters as organisations were studied as varieties of human service
organisations identical with similar organisations extensively discussed by Hasenfeld
(1983, and 1992). For the same reason, the interaction of shelter organisation,
management, and staff with the shelter residents (the children) as the recipients of the
shelter services and programs was itself a phenomenon worth the enquiry. The
outcome of the interplay between children and shelters staff, service delivery and
programs are the determining factors of the effectiveness of intervention/reintegration
programs to redress the social exclusion of the children. The causes of children's social
exclusion are many, complex and interlinked. Shelters are the organs or institutions of
society determined to rise above the difficulties and challenges posed by the
phenomenon of children living and/or working on the streets. The irony is shelters have
difficulties accessing enough public funds to be effective. Cost-effectiveness of the
shelters, the provision of services, coupled with the implementation of intervention
strategies was a persistent concern of the managers and staff. In a report to the annual
general meeting of Durban Streets Children Forum, Khoza (2003) said that shelters
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