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Cape Town Together and the Community Action Networks (CANs
In March 2020, as COVID-19 was rapidly taking hold in South Africa, a network of neighbourhood-level community support and mutual aid groups began to emerge across the city of Cape Town. This movement of Community Action Networks (CANs), known as Cape Town Together, was initiated by a small team of social justice activists, community workers, and public health specialists, who knew that a co-ordinated and robust community response would be fundamental to confronting the challenges of COVID-19, many of which would not be clinical or health-related at all, but rather socio-economic. The idea behind the initiative was that any group of ordinary residents, no matter their background, training or means, could come together and start a CAN in their own neighbourhood. Within a few weeks, hundreds of CANs had appeared across the city, spanning the usual divides that have come to characterise Cape Town – racial, spatial and class-based.
The CANs are self-organised, voluntary and completely autonomous, with residents deciding how best to respond to the COVID-19-related challenges in their particular contexts. There is no hierarchy and decisions are made entirely independently. CANs, or CAN members, came together to form specific organising nodes to take on cross-CAN tasks, including the hosting of weekly ‘co-learning’ sessions that were open to the whole network and covered a wide range of topics from applying for the COVID-19 relief grant to dealing with increased levels of domestic violence due to lockdown. Many forms of spontaneous collaboration and co-ordination were experimented with. One of the primary tasks taken on by CANs across the city was to respond to the ‘second pandemic’ of hunger, where the already high levels of food insecurity in the city were severely exacerbated by stringent lockdown regulations. Community kitchens sprang up around the city and became central to the network’s activity. They also became important places where COVID-19 safety practices - such as masks, social distancing and sanitising - could be demonstrated and shared with people in a relatable and approachable way.
With the support of the School of Public Health (SOPH) an Action Learning CAN Fellowship Programme was developed for eight community organisers/activists from a number of different CANs. This group was able to work together throughout the course of 2020 to facilitate a range of cross-CAN activities, including regular reflection and learning opportunities, five cross-CAN workshops, two city-wide bike rides, and story collecting sessions and interviews. Regular engagements with the Department of Health were also held as part of supporting a societal COVID-19 response.
The Action Learning Programme also contributed to supporting the establishment and moderation of on-line platforms to enable city-wide organising, including the Facebook page and WhatsApp groups. It also enabled discussion and co-learning sessions between Cape Town Together, Eastern Cape Together and Gauteng Together on our ‘Imagined Futures’ and how to build alternatives in a post-COVID world. Lastly, a local model for COVID-19 care was developed, including an on-line training module for communitybased support for COVID-positive people.
The support extended by SOPH also made it possible to fund a number of projects documenting these efforts. Some of the valuable lessons and experiences from this time of intense community mobilisation were captured in a self-published book of community kitchen recipes, stories and accounts of the work of Cape Town Together and the CANs titled Dala Kitchen – More than a Cookbook. A short documentary film on Cape Town Together provided another opportunity to tell the story of the CANs and the work of thousands of ordinary people working to support their communities during the pandemic.
