This week we commenced community profiling in Lantana, a low income neighbourhood in Paarl East. This is an essential step in activating community ownership through the Ranyaka Protocol.
We need to tackle the broader structures and systems that shape living together with communities and local role players. Our neighbourhoods hold incredible potential to self-organise and sometimes all that is required is an ‘engine room’ or so-called backroom that co-ordinates and facilitates this process.
Last week, Ranyaka and Impact Funding Platform, Valcare, co-hosted a community stakeholder workshop in Lantana, Paarl. This workshop is part of a journey that (and this is our hope) will see Lantana move towards transforming itself into a thriving community.
These workshops focus on identifying the key challenges, priorities, roleplayers, resources, opportunities and potential projects by really listening to what the people who live and work in this area have to say. Listening is only step one. Local role players need to be the drivers of change in their communities. Our task is never to replace that critical role and the more we work in towns and neighbourhoods, the more we discover the immense wealth of social capital that is already present and ready to be mobilised.
Lantana is one of the areas that forms part of Nedbank’s Proud about my Town programme for which Ranyaka is the implementing agent in seven different areas.