The Adventure Club: How Surfing, Skating and Swimming Are Saving Lives in Cape Town
A board, a wave, an empty pool. For kids from Dunoon, this is where the future looks different.
Every Saturday morning, a group of young people from Dunoon loads into a SAVE van and heads toward the ocean. Some of them have never seen the ocean up close, despite living 20 kilometres from some of the most famous surfing coastline in the world. Most of them cannot swim. By the time they leave, that is changing.
The SAVE Adventure Club is not a sports programme in the traditional sense. There are no league tables, no trophies, no scouts. There is just a group of young people from one of Cape Town’s most pressured communities, spending time in an environment where the only thing that matters is whether they try.
The Numbers, Year by Year
UNODC research found that in Western Cape secondary schools, 22.4% of learners drink alcohol daily, 10% use cannabis regularly, and approximately 15% live in households where someone is a gang member. South Africa’s overall teenage pregnancy prevalence among school-going girls has held at around 11% across three national surveys. In communities like Dunoon, where poverty, unemployment, and cramped living conditions compress every pressure into a tight space, these are not averages — they are the environment.
Why These Three Sports
Swimming is survival. In a country where drowning is one of the leading causes of unintentional injury death in children, teaching a child from a landlocked township to swim is literally lifesaving. It also opens the ocean — and the culture and opportunity that comes with it — to young people who have been physically adjacent to it their whole lives without ever accessing it. Surfing is confronting fear. The ocean does not accommodate uncertainty or self-doubt — you either commit or the wave takes you. Young people who learn to surf discover something that transfers immediately to the rest of their lives: the experience of being afraid, doing it anyway, and surviving. Skateboarding is individual expression. It has no referee, no team to hide behind. It is creativity and persistence in physical form, and it carries a culture — international, inclusive, counter-cultural — that resonates particularly strongly with young people who already feel outside the mainstream.
"Sport involvement was strongly linked to confidence and positive identity in youth, which may lessen risk-taking behaviours associated with poor self-esteem and susceptibility to peer pressure." — PMC Review on Sport-Based Interventions in Africa."
What the Adventure Club Actually Does
The Adventure Club meets regularly, run by SAVE volunteers and staff who are present week after week — not one-off visitors but consistent adult figures who know these young people's names, their families, and their ambitions. Research on at-risk youth consistently identifies the presence of stable, non-parental adult role models as one of the most protective factors against negative outcomes. The club is deliberately mixed — different ages, different backgrounds, volunteers alongside community members. A teenager from Dunoon learning to surf alongside a volunteer from Denmark gets something no classroom can provide: the lived experience that the world is bigger than the street he grew up on.
An Escape and an Opening
A Saturday at the beach is an expansion of what is possible. A young girl who spends a Saturday morning learning to surf in Muizenberg is not thinking about the gang on her street. She is thinking about the wave. Several Adventure Club participants have gone on to pursue surfing independently. Some have become informal coaches themselves — bringing younger children from the community to the water. The ripple is real, and it starts with a van on a Saturday morning and a SAVE volunteer who shows up.