Mercer On Mission
Mercer On Mission
Business

South Africa

TRAVEL DATES:
May 14 – June 6, 2025
GENERAL INFO:
Through Mercer On Mission, students and faculty play a part in combating homelessness in Cape Town, South Africa. Each summer, they spend three weeks working with nonprofit organization Izitalato (Streetscapes) to make its services for the homeless population more sustainable.

Meeting a Need

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.

What You'll Do

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:

  • Intensive class work introducing students to the social business, accounting and environmental engineering concepts, and analytical tools to be used in South Africa.
  • In-country cultural awareness and teambuilding in a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary setting.
  • Hard but rewarding work analyzing Streetscapes's social enterprises and their engineering components before making, testing and presenting recommendations that set the stage for future work.
  • Exposure to innovative approaches that tackle unemployment, homelessness and environmental concerns.
  • Some educational sight-seeing opportunities, conditions and budget permitting, including two World Heritage sites, Table Mountain and Robben Island; the Cape of Good Hope where the south Atlantic and Indian oceans meet; District Six; and those famous African penguins.
Ashton Bearden

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.

Ashton Bearden
Bachelor of Business Management, ’22, MBA, ‘23

Academic Courses

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.

  • BUS 377: Special Topics: Social Enterprise in the 21st Century City
  • ACC 379: Special Topics in Accounting: Accounting for Social Enterprises
  • ECV 492: Special Topics: Environmental Sustainability in the Developing World

Faculty

  • Harold Tessendorf – Adjunct Business Professor, Stetson-Hatcher School of Business
  • Dr. Blake Bowler – Assistant Professor of Accounting, Stetson-Hatcher School of Business
  • Dr. Michael Fleming – Assistant Professor of Environmental and Civil Engineering, School of Engineering 

Latest MOM News

Interested?

Students interested in participating in a Mercer on Mission program will need to complete an online application before being considered for admission.
© Mercer University. All rights reserved.