Curriculum Development Project Trust

The Early Childhood Development Programmes are trained nationally and aims at training Early Childhood Development Practitioners, Trainers, Community Development Workers, Toy Librarians and Caregivers to use arts and culture to introduce young children between the ages of birth and 6 years to creative thinking and practice – to learn to be innovative, to organise their ideas and understanding, to gain motor skills, to find that learning is fun.

The Women Make their Mark Programmes focus on women activists. In these courses, women use the creative arts as expressive vehicles for transformation – to explore and express their own understanding and experiences[; to share these ideas and skills with other women; and to build women’s voices in our patriarchy society which too often uses violence and power to silence us.

The CDP works with groups of people living in the Johannesburg Inner City, Bertrams, Ellis Park Precinct and Johannesburg East area to build collective care for our own environment and immediate communities: to beautify parks and public spaces; with children to create a lantern festival; to use the arts to heal the pain of xenophobia and prejudice.

Originally conceived to develop creative arts curricula for the public schools system in an independent South Africa, CDP today still maintains projects to advance and develop arts learning and teaching in the schools. These include working with teachers and students to make masks for the Gauteng Children's Carnival; and organising secondary schools to learn about, and place on their walls, South Africa’s national symbols. The CDP developed the Artist in Schools Policy Document which was approved in January 2013.