Two best friends join a team of Cape Town volunteers to pack comfort packs for abused children; small bags filled with big doses of love, care and healing.
Cape Town, South Africa (16 October 2025) – When best friends Jennifer Roeleveld and Penny Croxford arrive to do volunteer work for Friends of Child Protection (FCP) for a few hours, a smiling Roeleveld announces: “We are eager beavers, so we want to get started”. They were among 13 volunteers who gathered at an office in the Cape Town suburb of Claremont, on September 16, to pack comfort packs, containing various items, including a soft toy, for child abuse victims.
Roeleveld says: “It’s good to have a pal with you. We travel here together from Pinelands. There’s a camaraderie with the people you work with.”
Croxford says: “We work quickly and we work well together. We’re very different, but we get along so well. I think what’s special about the work we do is that we give of our time to help vulnerable children”.
FCP, a non-profit organisation (NPO) formed in 2002, has distributed comfort packs to 106,561 child survivors of abuse in the Western Cape since 2006, the year when they started counting the packs. Besides a soft toy, often a teddy, comfort packs also contain items such as a snack pack, facecloth, soap, tissues, underwear, deodorant, bubbles and a toothbrush and toothpaste. They are meant to offer a little bit of consolation amid the trauma.
The packs are distributed to 18 of the police’s child protection units. Police members hand them over to abused children when they arrive at the police station to complain and be examined.
Roeleveld, a tax consultant, and Croxford, a retired sales assistant in the building industry, receive three batches of donations: colouring booklets with four pages, packets of crayons and sheets of stickers. They take one of each item, put them together in a small plastic bag, tie the bag and place them neatly in a large bag. They’re doing what is called a “pre-pack”. Eventually, on a bigger packing day, involving more volunteers packing 1,200 comfort packs every two months, the items they place in the big bag will be transferred to comfort packs.
Roeleveld became involved through the Gardens Presbyterian Church 10 years ago when FCP was involved in a service focusing on child protection. Croxford started volunteering about four years ago when Roeleveld introduced her to FCP.
Roeleveld says: “All the teddies used to be boy teddies. But we said: ‘Wait a minute, the victims are mostly girls’. So now, most of our teddies are girls. The girl teddies have skirts, so you can’t have a skirt without a broekie. So now, the volunteers knit “broekies” for them.
“Another item we sometimes add is a soft ball to play with to release some of the tension. It’s lovely to work with the facecloths and soap because it smells so nice”.
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Croxford says: “Not all the soft toys are teddies. Sometimes, it’s a little dinosaur or leopard. It’s important for the children to hold. All the teddies have scarves so the children can fiddle with it”.
Another volunteer, Marge Upfold, a retired buyer for industrial instrumentation, says: “I think it makes a big difference. Just the toy itself, the children find comfort in the toy. It doesn’t matter how old they are; even the teenagers enjoy having the toy.”
Upfold says being an FCP volunteer “gives me a sense of fulfilment”.
“I had a happy childhood, but I would like to help those less fortunate. I enjoy giving back to the community”.
Also a volunteer, Bev Howell, who works as an admin officer for a financial planner, is the coordinator of the packing. She thinks “something to eat and something to cuddle” are most important. The snack pack includes oats for breakfast, noodles for lunch and a fruit juice.
“We’re putting a band aid on something that needs to be healed. I think maybe it makes a child feel a little bit better, it’s something to comfort them.”
The organisation was formed by a UK resident, Kerrin Marcon, who read an article in Fairlady in 2002 about the Child Protection Unit while visiting her mother, Flo Borcherds, in Cape Town. The article moved Marcon so deeply that she started FCP.
In 2002, FCP supplied two child protection units with comfort packs. Now, it not only supports 18 such units, but also supplies 10 Thuthuzela Care Centres (TCCs), which are the National Prosecuting Authority’s rape care management centres, as well as four Safeline branches and the Red Cross children’s hospital. FCP relies entirely on donations and volunteers.
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