The CCID’s Social Development manager, Pat Eddy, sheds light on the campaign and how to show you care this winter.
GIVE RESPONSIBLY is a call to action. The first call in Cape Town was made in 2008, in the CBD, when the Cape Town Central City Improvement District (CCID) acknowledged that homelessness had brought with it many challenges to the CBD, as it does across the globe when a downtown area becomes a strong economic node.
Brainstorming the idea of how best to take on the challenges, we identified the “call” and attached it to an “action”: to encourage those generous and compassionate people who wanted to make a difference to the lives of the homeless to support the many and varied NGOs that help people in need. It spoke to the concept that a hand up would always be a better option than a hand out.
With the CCID’s area of operation being a relatively compact 1.6km2 of the metropole’s traditional CBD (Central City) area, our own efforts in driving the GIVE RESPONSIBLY message have been to encourage donations to those incredible NGOs with whom we work on a daily basis to assist our own street clients in the Central City – to give these clients the possibility of a hand up rather than a life on the streets spent living hand to mouth each day. And it’s about far more than just providing shelter (although this is both critically important and desperately needed as well).
As the Cape Town CCID, we also work with a number of NGOs that provide rehabilitation, skills training, education, reintegration programmes, a work opportunity or even just a meal and a chance for a shower or a clean change of clothes. What has heartened us over the years since we first developed the GIVE RESPONSIBLY call to action, and made all our own campaign material available as open source, are the numerous other entities that have adopted the call.
The City of Cape Town is one and today its own GIVE RESPONSIBLY campaign, and in turn the City’s Winter Readiness programme, concentrates on providing additional mattresses and food for shelters, where resources are stretched to the absolute limit. Other entities have ranged from individuals across the country hoping to make a difference, to NGOs in other metropoles. Most recently, the open-source information was sent to the Real Change movement in Pasadena in the USA where we are now exchanging ideas with that movement’s housing director.
No one will ever be able to stop people from giving spare change directly to people on the street: emotion plays a huge part in this action particularly as we move deeper into a wet and cold Cape Town winter and an ever-widening global economic divide. But as the CCID we can continue to put our call to GIVE RESPONSIBLY out there, and perhaps ask those who can to dig deep into their pockets and place their money where it can hopefully and ultimately make a real difference. In this issue, we’ve provided you with a number of alternatives as to how you can assist, including a new SnapScan option to complement our other existing channels (as you’ll see to the right of this page).
This article first appeared in the Tough Times, a supplement that was distributed with the June/July 2015 issue of City Views. Read it online.