During the month of March, Rosanne Haggerty, President of Community Solutions as well as a member of the Advisory Committee of the Institute of Global Homelessness (IGH) in the United States, visited the Cape Town Central City Improvement District (CCID) together with Kat Johnson, IGH’s director.
The visit to Cape Town follows an encounter between Rosanne and Pat Eddy, manager of CCID Social Development, at the 2017 International Downtown Association (IDA) Conference, held in Winnipeg, Canada.
With IGH supporting an emerging global movement to end street homelessness, the original purpose of the duo’s visit to South Africa was to formally welcome the city of Tshwane to IGH’s “A Place to Call Home” international campaign, aimed at supporting 150 cities to end street homelessness by 2030. The campaign will begin with a small group of vanguard cities across all six continents and each city will commit to achieving a goal by the end of 2020. The goal may be one of the following: ending street homelessness; reducing it; or committing to a goal specific to a population of people living on the street.
On 15 March 2018, the City of Tshwane announced its participation and became the fourth vanguard city to join the campaign. With Kat and Rosanne already travelling to South Africa for this occasion and following Rosanne’s encounter with Pat at the IDA, the duo then also decided to extend their South African visit to Cape Town.
At the IDA conference, Rosanne (whose organisation, Community Solutions, works to end homelessness and the conditions that create it) became interested in how the CCID’s social development team engages with Cape Town Central City’s most vulnerable individuals and forms partnerships that will alleviate the CBD’s own challenges.
According to Pat, sharing insights with her international counterparts was heartening: “Often, when dealing with an issue as complex as homelessness in the Central City, it is easy to feel as if we’re alone; but we’re not. Through my interaction with both Rosanne and Kat, it became apparent that most cities around the world are also struggling with the same issues that, together with our local partners, are facing. These include substance use among people who live on the street, health issues, a lack of shelters and resources.”
The purpose behind the Cape Town visit was to gain insights on the work carried out by the CCID’s Social Development department around homelessness and how it collaborates in this regard with a number of partner NGOs throughout the metropole.
Through their interaction with Pat, both international visitors expressed their wish that the City of Cape Town also consider following Tshwane’s example, particularly as it was already embarking on initiatives such as the “safe space” project for homeless people expected to be operational in May 2018. They were also equally heartened by the work of the CCID and its partner NGOs, being of the view that homelessness was an issue that could be solved through a clear, shared global goal.
Says Pat: “It is encouraging that now, through initiatives such as IGH’s ‘A Place to Call Home’, cities ̶ including Tshwane right here in South Africa ̶ are coming together to talk in a more formal way about their shared experiences. There is also the realisation that while every city is unique, some level of creativity must be applied to finding sustainable solutions to dealing with people living on the street, and that a collective approach to understanding and getting to grips with issues affecting people living on the street is needed. This is something we, as the CCID and our partners, have always believed in.”
Image by Institute of Global Homelessness