Give at Christmas, and help children feel at home
Sparrows is a children’s home in Tarkastad in the Eastern Cape. At the moment 30 children live with us, placed by the court. Our aim is always to return each child to their family. While they are with us they have a safe home, schooling, therapy and people who care about them.
Many people give at Christmas, and Advent, the four weeks before it, is when many churches, schools and families begin. This page shows the ways to give, what to know before you buy gifts or plan a collection, and how to get a section 18A receipt for a December gift.
Ways to give this Christmas
Give once
Choose R100, R250, R500 or an amount of your own, from R50, on our home page. You pay securely through PayFast. The minimum is R50 because PayFast charges a fee on every payment.
Turn a Christmas gift into a monthly gift
Tell us you would like to give monthly and we will send you our bank details so you can set up a standing order. Regular gifts are what we can plan around, all year and not only in December.
Give goods or presents
Please ask us before you buy or bring anything. We cannot accept an item that would break a standard we must meet for the children’s care, such as a mattress thinner than the required 15 cm. Where an item is useful to someone else, we pass it on to people in the community who need it.
Give time or a skill
If you have a skill you would like to offer, tell us what it is and we will talk. Anyone who would spend time with the children goes through our safe recruitment steps first.
If your church, school or club is planning something
Please ask us first, and do not raise money or collect goods in Sparrows’ name until we have agreed to it. Sparrows does not accept cash payments, so please bank what your group collects and pay it to us by electronic transfer or through PayFast. We cannot take part in a raffle or lucky draw. For the full rules, see For Community Groups.
Your section 18A receipt
Sparrows is a public benefit organisation (PBO 93000-5523) approved by the South African Revenue Service (SARS) to issue section 18A receipts. A receipt lets you deduct a genuine gift of money or goods, for which you receive nothing in return, from your taxable income, up to 10% of that income in the year you give. Anything above 10% carries forward to the next year. For an individual, a gift made in December falls in the tax year that ends on 28 February 2027.
When you ask for a receipt, we reply asking for your name, address, identity number and income tax reference number. We report every receipt to SARS.
We cannot issue a receipt for your time or professional services, a ticket to a Christmas dinner, dance or golf day, a raffle ticket, something you bought at an auction, or a gift you have promised but not yet paid.
No conditions, and the children’s privacy
A child’s taking part in a group’s religious, cultural or similar activities is never a condition of our accepting a gift or continuing a group’s support. Please do not use a photograph, name or story of a child in our care in a Christmas appeal.
How we account for your gift
Sparrows is a registered non-profit organisation (NPO 026-901). Our financial statements are audited every year, and we record donations separately from the Department of Social Development’s payments. We thank every donor by name in our annual report, unless you ask us not to, and we never publish the value of an individual gift.
We use your name, e-mail address and message only to reply to your enquiry. How we handle personal information is set out in our Privacy Policy. Please do not put your identity or tax number in this form: we ask for what a receipt needs when we reply.