Monwabisi Park 2010 Profile of Assets

Click for the full profile book: Monwabisi-Park-Profile-of-Assets-2010.pdf [3.4 MB].

The Profile of Assets

This Profile of Assets was written during an eight-week-long project in 2010 by four American college students from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, USA. To produce this document, we interviewed many community members from Monwabisi Park, an informal settlement in Khayelitsha, to learn more about current conditions. We owe them an enormous measure of thanks for their generosity and willingness to answer our many questions.

The purpose of writing this Profile of Assets is to describe the economic, social and cultural resources of Monwabisi Park. A resource or asset can refer to a youth group, a community hall, or a local business. This book is a snapshot taken in 2010 and can serve as a baseline. It is our hope that community members and others will add new material to this book so that the current conditions of Monwabisi Park can be compared from year to year. When someone compares this version of the book to a version made five years from now, they should be able to see if different assets have changed over time. This will help people to know if conditions are getting better in Monwabisi Park, and to have written documentation of these changes.

This Profile is organized into six main chapters: Cultural/Social, Economic, Institutional, Safety and Security, Infrastructure, and Personal Profiles. In these chapters we focused on faith-based groups and youth groups, barber shops, hair salons, and spaza shops, formal crèches, the weekend patrol, the B Section Community Hall, and individual volunteers from Monwabisi Park, respectively . The first five chapter titles were taken from the Community Action Plan developed by the Violence Protection through Urban Upgrading programme (VPUU) from the city of Cape Town and the Safe Nodes Action Committee (SNAC), a group of local leaders, in Monwabisi Park.

In addition to the information represented in our Profile of Assets, our team collected many photographs and videos not included in the book, which are available organized by chapter, from the following links:

Cultural/Social

Economic

Institution

Safety and Security

Infrastructure