Wellness Foundation Wellness Foundation is a civil society organisation that provides care and support to community care workers (CCW’s).  The organisation works at the local and national as well as within the Southern African region with emerging links in the global south around the issues of care workers. Wellness Foundation provides direct psycho-social support to CCW’s as well as capacity building to their organisations.  Over the past years the organisation has also strengthened the capacity of a group of local CCW’s to establish a CCW Forum, a platform for mobilising and organising CCW’s in Cape Town and beyond around the call for decent work and a living wage. In order to continue to provide quality timeout and support to community care workers resulting in more productive staff able to better manage stress, reduced absenteeism in the workplace, improved service delivery and care works able to share their learnings, <p></p>Wellness Foundation (WF) conducted several education sessions. Wellness Foundation hosted 78 (2 hours each) Wellness education sessions for about 1 600 community care workers from all 9 provinces in South Africa. These sessions focused on debriefing and counselling in terms of trauma and loss. <p></p>WF hosted 7 health and wellness educations workshops for 175 community care workers with the objective to teach carers self-care tools, to improve motivation and energy levels of carers, to address and link self-care to National Strategic Plan on HIV, STI and TB and provide carers with information that increase carers knowledge of factors that impact on health and wellbeing. Self-care retreats have been conducted to community care workers in 6 provinces, focus was on community care workers from Knysna affected by fire last year. Within the Change makers – youth empowerment project WF intends to empower youth to be change agents within their families, community and broader society focusing on gender based violence, sexual and reproductive health and rights, gender equality, psycho-social support, human rights occupational health and safety and decent work and nutrition. <p></p>WF conducted 48 different session for the group of youth they work with (about 800). <p></p>There is a strong movement to build a national voice across South Africa to address issues that community care workers face in their workplace and the lack of recognition for their work from government. South African Care Workers Forum, formed some years ago with the support from WF, is one of the driving forces in these issues and with help of WF they are planning a national advocacy event later this year. <p></p>The regional care workers movement, also initiated by WF, is aiming towards a strong, resilient, cost-effective and independent movement of community health carers, engage organised labour (trade unions) and continue to tap into the self-care alliance with WF and others. <p></p>WF visited care workers in Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Botswana. Lessons learnt from the visits are that all care workers work in terrible working conditions, in stressful environments, as they also work with people living with HIV/AIDS. Most stressful is the fact that they have to face clients who are living in poverty and they are in poverty themselves as well as the lack of government support and recognition of their work as formal and them as workers. The nature of care work is diverse in all countries, it includes anything from working with patients to administrative and management tasks. In some countries like Mozambique the network´s activities starts to bear fruits as the department of health currently is discussing an improved remuneration for care workers. The visits were able to uncover many of these problems and showed that there is an international need for community care work to be formalized, for women to be elevated in society, and for decent work principles and human rights to be enforced. Not just for community care workers in the visited countries but in all countries in the SADC region.