Love Cities

Our Work

Our Work

THE PROBLEM

South African towns face numerous challenges, including ineffective governance, corruption, inadequate infrastructure, insufficient funding, unemployment, high poverty rates, skills deficits, poor education systems, social inequality, crime, lack of accountability, political instability, limited economic opportunities, healthcare inadequacies, inadequate housing, community disconnection, resource misallocation, limited public transportation, social unrest, bureaucratic inefficiencies, deteriorating public facilities, insufficient investment, and a lack of basic services, all contributing to systemic dysfunction and stagnation

This extensive list paints a dismal picture of a nation where massive potential and promise has not been developed optimally. The everyday reality for the average citizen is rather bleak, as ethical leadership, basic human dignity and access to essential services wane in this country.

You Can

feel the pervading anxiety in every conversation.

You Can

sense the panic as young moms struggle to feed their children.

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hear how hopeless the jobseekers are after countless rejection letters.

You Can

see the need for change.

Our Work

What is missing?

While we see the need for change, there are a number of barriers that prevent communities from being the solution to their own problems, with key ‘missing parts’ to ensuring sustainable, long-term transformation. These include:

Integrated and Holistic Approaches:

Many community development initiatives are siloed, focusing on specific issues without considering the interconnections between economic, social, and environmental factors. Love Cities seeks to develop a more integrated approach that addresses the root causes of poverty and inequality, while promoting sustainable development, could lead to more impactful outcomes.

Empowerment and Capacity Building:

There is a need for initiatives that genuinely empower local communities. This includes not only building skills but also providing access to resources and decision-making processes. Love Cities seeks to strengthen community participation to foster ownership of development projects, leading to more sustainable outcomes.

Collaboration and Partnerships:

Effective collaboration among government, NGOs, private sector, and communities is often lacking. Establishing strong partnerships can leverage resources, share knowledge, and bring diverse perspectives to the table. Love Cities seeks to be a ‘platform for partnerships’ that enable more effective problem-solving and innovation in addressing community challenges.

Sustainable Economic Opportunities:

There is a critical need for sustainable economic development initiatives that create jobs and promote entrepreneurship. This includes supporting small businesses, cooperatives, and social enterprises, particularly in under-resourced areas. Love Cities seeks to focus on personal empowerment, education at all levels and cutting-edge vocational training aligned with market demands can to help address unemployment and economic disparity.

Data-Driven Decision Making:

With a lack of reliable data and evidence to inform community development strategies, we often make ad-hoc decisions that create more harm than good. Love Cities seeks to invest in data collection, monitoring, and evaluation to help identify needs more accurately, measure impact, and refine approaches over time. Ensuring that data is accessible and used by communities can empower them to advocate for their own needs.

Addressing these gaps requires a concerted effort from all stakeholders, including government, civil society, and the private sector, to work collaboratively towards a shared vision for community development that prioritizes inclusivity, sustainability, and resilience. Love Cities is the vehicle to see this vision become a reality across South African villages, townships, towns and cities.

Our Work

OUR SOLUTION

Love Cities offers a collective impact approach to community-led transformation that focuses on empowering communities to use a collaborative, positive, asset-based framework to tackle complex, systemic social problems. Through activating shared agency and applying holistic, proven, and organized solutions to localized community problems, we aim to affect long term, sustainable, and measurable change in South Africa.

Our Work

OUR APPROACH

Our four-fold approach, ‘Investigate, Innovate, Incorporate, Invite’, aims to deliver on this promise.

INVESTIGATE

‘If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about the solution’ (Albert Einstein)

KEY OBJECTIVES:

  • Understand the key aspirations, needs and root causes of problems in a community.
  • Draw key stakeholders together to facilitate discussions that focus on active
  • listening, enquiry-based learning, and building trust.
  • Identify the dominant narrative and key influencers in shaping a community’s shared beliefs.
  • Gather data to drive collective decision making and community action plans.
  • Identify key assets in communities that can be leveraged for community development.
  • Connect people and cultivate a shared desire for change

KEY ELEMENTS:

Research

Greenlight Poverty Measurement Tool: This internationally acclaimed diagnostic tool helps all our partners to accurately measure the levels of poverty in key geographical spaces, creating a roadmap for project teams to start helping communities to emerge from these problems with courage, co-operation and clear actionable plans.

Community Surveys and Focus Groups: Believing that every voice matters in community development, these online and in-person data collection mechanisms help to gain valuable insights and speed up the process of building trust with communities.

Narrative Change

Multi-stakeholder Story Mapping Workshops: This approach follows restorative narrative principles that seeks to give a voice to stories of courage, triumph in the midst of tragedy, growth, kindness, solutions for everyday problems and celebration. We want to see core beliefs and thinking patterns that are negative, begin to be overshadowed by positivity and hope.

Co-ordinated Communications Strategy: Crafting stories that shape the culture of a community are essential to start seeing a different attitude in each community. Finding creative ways to communicate these stories, e.g. film, song, street art, photography etc.

Community Asset Mapping

Asset Based Community Development (ABCD): Mapping in all 6 Domains of ABCD (human, associations, institutions, physical and natural assets, local economy, culture/stories) to enable citizens to see the vast wealth that exists in their community instead of their lack. It highlights areas of possibility, innovation and opportunity. The ABCD approach seeks to help communities to see themselves as co-producers of health and well-being, rather than the recipients of services.

Organized Communities: Subregions are organized around geographical areas and key leadership spheres are identified to enable multi-sector collaboration. This leads to greater by-in from all stakeholders and a higher likelihood of action as action teams are set in place to drive change in key areas identified in the community forums.

INNOVATE

If you have always done it that way, its probably wrong’ (Charles Kettering)

KEY OBJECTIVES:

  • Initiate community agency and asset-based design thinking.
  • Co-develop focused, collaborative action plans that leverage existing assets to solve identified community problems.
  • Test ideas and measure change, with continued feedback structures to ensure agile strategies are developed.

KEY ELEMENTS:

Community Forums

Community Forums: Community members with lived experience of poverty, local business/NGO/local government/faith organizations gather to challenge assumptions, create ideas and develop a prototype action plan that links assets to identified problems. This approach helps us to co-design strategic plans that align with legislation, sound planning principles and community-informed practices.

Test Phase: Project teams trial ideas and measure impact, providing data for decision making.

Cross-Sector Think Tanks

Host roundtable discussions, representative of key influencers across different sectors in/around a community, that aim to mobilize assets in support of community prototype plans

INCORPORATE

‘Innovation means replacing the best practices of today with those of tomorrow’ (Paul Sloane)

KEY OBJECTIVES:

  • Incorporate support structures, resources and proven models of development into community led action plans.
  • Build on findings from prototype testing with research, shared knowledge, skills, networks.
  • Mobilize resources to accelerate impact and momentum
  • Ongoing measurement and evaluation of programs to ensure we meet our goal of thriving communities.
  • Support project teams and organizations in the implementation of coordinated strategic plans.

KEY ELEMENTS:

Best Practice Models

Evidence-based project implementation plans in the following key areas: narrative development, place development, social development, skills development, economic development

Training & Capacity Building

Leveraging the experience of thought leaders and proven development models in Impact Sector

Knowledge sharing and co-creation of viable solutions

Governance

Promote accountability, transparency and reputational excellence

Brand Equity

Local startups able to build trust quickly based on reputation of national brand.

Co-ordinated applications and distribution of social investment funding

Website listing and increased exposure

Systems & Backbone Infrastructure

Love Cities App (platform of community partnership, mobilization, positive narrative, service delivery)

Love Cities Toolkits (how to guides for all projects)

Love Cities Support Services & Product Offering to enable scaling of impact.

INVITE

‘If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.’ (African Proverb)

KEY OBJECTIVES:

  • Build National partnerships for the sake of local change. This includes engaging with all stakeholders: business, government, faith organizations, non-profits, academia, media and active citizens.
  • Advocacy work on behalf of partners to affect change on a larger scale.
  • Collaborative efforts across Nation
  • Manage social investment and volunteer involvement to ensure maximum impact and sustainability
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KEY ELEMENTS:

Community of Best Practice

  • Impact Sector Leadership Development Academy
  • Gatherings for mutual support, learning and relationship building

Social Investment

  • Provide services that enhance the flow of information and advice needed by local and international donors when making investment decisions in South Africa
  • Act as platform for scaled investments in social changes across partners’ network

Advocacy Group

  • Influence public policy and resource allocation decisions within political, economic, and social systems and institutions.
  • Inform, leverage, voice, organize and assess for the sake of driving social change