Over 14,000 people are estimated to be homeless in Cape Town, and half of those are considered to be chronically homeless, meaning they’ve been homeless for more than one year and have a serious mental health condition or substance addiction.
Streetscapes takes a holistic approach to helping South Africans get off the streets by providing housing and psychosocial services, like counseling and support groups, and working through the group’s small social enterprises, including an urban farm, contract cleaning of public toilets in Cape Town’s central business district, and an eco-laundromat. It is also incubating initiatives in composting and value-added food products.
Mercer On Mission teams have been assessing Streetscape’s existing social enterprises before creating and testing recommendations to share with the organization’s managers and supervisors. These recommendations have resulted in measurable improvements in Streetscapes’ operations and revenue.
This Mercer On Mission project will involve working with Streetscapes to build on its existing social enterprises and taking its new ventures to the next level. Students will learn and work alongside Streetscapes, conducting hands-on research and analysis to improve its operations, building relationships with key partners and customers, creating plans and practical training materials, and continuing to measure whether and how earlier recommendations have increased Streetscapes’s revenues. Once again, these recommendations will be evaluated by how well they meet financial viability, social impact and environmental sustainability metrics.
Students participating in this program can expect:
What I enjoyed the most was honestly working beside the clients and the upper administration there. Because when you work beside the clients, you kind of get a better idea of what they’re going through because they were homeless, and you understand how difficult it is for them, but you can also see how much their lives have changed because of this organization.
Students are required to sign up for six hours of credit. The registrar will enroll you in courses for your program, including one class from each of the program's faculty.