We’re delighted to discover Cape Town’s CANs movement - “community action networks” that have been keeping a city together, under Covid
From Cape Town Together’s Facebook group
It’s truly exciting to see when new ideas and practices arise simultaneously, but quite unaware of each other, in far-off parts of the world.
The innovation theorist Steven Johnson calls these “multiples” - like the simultaneous but separate discovery of sun-spots, oxygen, electrical batteries, the steam engine and telephone. In each case, the discovery rests on prior fundamental ideas that have already crossed borders. To isolate oxygen specifically, for example, there must be a general idea that air is made from gases.
The specific innovation finds an “adjacent possible” - a possibility space opened up by the general body of thinking. That’s why these ideas can happen, in synchrony, even though far apart in geography.
You could go deeper, and wonder whether this simultaneous change is explicable by means of scientific concepts like “fractal” or “quantum” (as we’re often exploring in these pages). Well, whether it’s a “multiple”, a “fractal” or a quantum entanglement—we’ve just experienced one of them.
Earlier this week, during a seminar at Schumacher College that included an exploration into what a Citizens Action Network might entail, a student wondered if we’d ever heard of South Africa’s CANs movement. No, we answered, we had not…
We’ve been thrumming with excitement ever since as we’ve been exploring this inspiring, Covid-triggered phenomenon. Johnson’s theory seems to pertain. If we are living in an era where social networks are generally being used by citizens and communities to empower themselves, then it seems like CANs have been an “adjacent possible” waiting to happen.
The best guide to these “Community Action Networks” (and their choice of ‘C’ is significant) is this long piece in Roar magazine from June 2020, written by a team of representatives of Cape Town CANs - more on that below.
But they all come under the general umbrella of Cape Town Together (the culture is best sampled from CTT’s vibrant Facebook page, which reports on the work of hundreds of CANs).
There’s also long lists of active CANs on the CTT website. They also provide some very usable starter PDFs that explain how to get a Community Action Network started (see images from them throughout this post):
The trigger for the formation of Cape Town’s CANs in March 2020, similar to the rise of Mutual Aid Networks in the UK, was the acute impact of the first wave of Covid infections, and then lockdowns.
While there were certainly some privations (around food, loneliness and monitoring the elderly) that drove the UK response, the extreme social and economic divides in CapeTown - and the crude and abusive nature of the SA government’s isolation measures - seem to have compelled the rise of these Community Action Networks, answering direct and urgent needs.
The Roar article picks up their thinking:
The idea is simple, and one that has caught on globally since the start of the pandemic. Neighborhoods organize themselves into localized community action groups, usually starting with a few people on a WhatsApp or Telegram group and growing from there in order to support the specific needs of neighbors and community members through the pandemic.
The CANs act locally, while also sharing collective wisdom and various resources through the broader network of Cape Town Together. They work collaboratively, recognizing that everyone brings something to the table. Some are weavers and builders, others are storytellers, caregivers or healers. Some are disruptors or warriors whilst others are experimenters and guides.
A practice of solidarity, radical generosity and collective care is cultivated. Organizing nodes arise and fall away as they are needed. A healthy amount of “slack in the system” is maintained, in order to stay agile and responsive, and reject unnecessary bureaucracy that might stifle initiative or action.
There are currently over 170 CANs in the city. Not every neighbourhood has a CAN and not all the CANs are working well — but the reach is substantial, and the spread has been catalytic.
…Cape Town Together sits alongside a number of other groups doing community-based work in response to the pandemic. This includes long-standing street committees in some neighborhoods, as well as many community-based organizations, NGOs and social justice movements advocating in a multitude of ways for a just and equitable response to COVID-19.
But it is the hyper-local, decentralized and anti-hierarchical nature of the Cape Town Together network — and the fact that it is an adaptive network, and not a structured and bureaucratized organization — that enables the kinds of dynamic, bottom-up ways of working that have emerged.
For the most part it is needs like access to food, water and safe ways to self-isolate that have driven the activities of the CANs and shaped what the network looks like.
Organizing with the resources that are immediately available, many of the CANs are the only source of relief for residents to turn to in their areas, while state resources lie out of reach, tangled up in bureaucracy or swallowed by the hazy web of inefficiency-cum-corruption that many South Africans have come to accept as inevitable.
Various community kitchen models have been experimented with — in some CANs people have opened up their home kitchens and started cooking for their neighbors. In others, local restaurants closed under the lockdown have reopened as free community kitchens.
Not long ago, a food growers’ CAN emerged from within the network, to connect small scale farmers, community gardeners and backyard food growers, to share knowledge and seeds and to contribute to a vision of food sovereignty in the city.
There is no centralized funding, but some CAN-specific fundraising is done within the network, allowing financial and other resources to be redistributed where they are needed to support these initiatives.
In sticking with the network’s ways of working, these relationships are built on the premise of solidarity — not charity — and ask people to engage with different forms of privilege, power dynamics and the politics of donor models and practices.
Through these activities, the meeting of basic needs is not emptied of social, cultural and political meaning, as is so often the case in standard humanitarian aid responses. When you know that it is your neighbors who have empty cupboards, it is a political act to start cooking. As we cook, food becomes a vehicle for the sharing of social and cultural practices, as well as politicizing the hunger in the first place — generating learning, consciousness and human connection.
Street-level organizing was a key element of the anti-apartheid movement. So, in South Africa, bottom-up, community-based social support is not a new idea. The memory of this kind of social organizing still exists in the hearts and minds of older generation South Africans.
Many have remarked how much this feels like the old days, before community-level action was co-opted by political parties or became overly bureaucratized and “NGO-ized.”
Now, in the context of a sold-out country, a failing social support structure, and wide-spread disenchantment with the rainbow-nation fairytale, a community-based response to COVID-19 is an idea whose time has come. Young or old, politically active or not — it is well within the realm of imagination for most of the general public.
For many, the attraction of the CAN may lie more in its appeal to direct action, questioning of the status quo and human connection in an unprecedented crisis situation, than in its potential as a space for articulating radical leftist politics in the traditional ways.
The Roar piece goes on to itemise some of the key lessons for all activism to be learned from the Cape Town CANs:
The power of relationships. In particular the hyper-local, interpersonal, mutual relationships that have emerged both within and across the CANs. A rejection of any bureaucracy that leads to concentration of power, hierarchy and ossification has allowed for an astonishing dynamism in the network — also articulated as “moving at the speed of trust.” This means moving quickly when things feel right and slowing down, sitting with the complexity and asking “why,” when they do not.
Of course, moving at the speed of trust is only possible because the network is built on interpersonal relationships. People get to know each other through organizing together, the network is its relationships (even if in some cases people have only ever met on Zoom calls and WhatsApp groups). Through the CANs, various actors within a neighborhood are brought together into a new configuration — one with the potential to stretch the boundaries of solidarity within that space.
While street committees and other neighborhood-level structures pre-existed COVID-19 and the CANs, in many cases these have been brought into relationship with one another and with new resident volunteers, creating space for a network of solidarity that is both wider, but possibly deeper as well. Many in the network have reflected that what makes these collaborations work, is that people from existing structures join the CAN not as a representative of an organization, but as a resident of that neighborhood.
CANs share experiences, reflections and advice regarding common challenges in virtual co-learning sessions, and a number of issue-specific CANs have emerged to tackle cross-network concerns such as homelessness and food security. Connection also happens through various decentralized clusters that emerge more spontaneously — so that the network does not just come together through centralized nodes of convergence, but also autonomously and dynamically as needed.
The rejection of party politics - another key tenet of the network, coupled with a recognition that all of this work is inherently political. As one CAN member stated, “every loaf of bread is political.” The CANs speak out loudly against injustices perpetrated by the state and political parties, but also work with local officials when there is mutual trust, and when they decide that doing so is the best way to resolve an issue.
In many cases, relationships in the network span boundaries between communities and institutional spaces, including government.
There are CAN members who are also public sector doctors, or paramedics, or government officials or their spouses. When CAN members were arrested for trying to prevent an illegal eviction, they were assisted by public servants who recognized this injustice, and through long standing relationships could negotiate release with a fine.
Trusted relationships with local law enforcement officials have enabled some CANs to continue food distribution efforts under lockdown and other CANs have asked for, and received, protection from local police when delivering food parcels in unsafe parts of their neighborhood.
These are decentralised networks, whose structures partly make all this possible. Cape Town Together is built on the premise that hyper local strategies, community-level intelligence and autonomous forms of decision-making are fundamental for an effective response to COVID-19. This means that if CANs want to collaborate with their local police station to deliver food parcels safely or register as a voluntary organization or NPO in order to access permits for moving around, they are entitled to do so.
These are autonomous decisions and strategies chosen by CANs in response to their localized realities and no one in the network can tell them otherwise — nor should they.
But decentralization is a neutral tool for organizing, rather than an intrinsically good thing. Coupled with the shifting power of collective and informal networks such as the CANs, it can raise complex tensions and contradictions that are difficult to navigate.
While CANs are able to act upon their own intelligence and initiative without asking permission, this also means that some CANs make decisions that feel out-of-step with the foundational principles of the network.
For example, a number of CANs have instituted bureaucratic accountability structures for dealing with cash donations. While this may be counter to the principle of trust-based organizing, it also might be an entirely appropriate and necessary response to local complexities.
The networks embrace humility, inclusivity and doubt. Part of working at the speed of trust means pausing to reflect when someone raises a feeling of discomfort. Because the social, economic and political challenges of this work are so complex, it is not always clear how best to take action.
In such cases, the first steps are recognizing what is unknown, opening up to differing perspectives and taking time to find connection or coherence. This requires moving with humility, valuing all contributions and rejecting inequalities of power and their infringement on decision-making processes. This work demands post-heroic leadership, or — in the words of adrienne maree brown — working from a place of “care and love rather than burnout and competition.”
These networks are led largely by women, which is not surprising nor insignificant. It’s women who have stepped forwards to get their hands dirty in the spaces opened up by flattened hierarchies and post-heroic leadership. This opening up of politics is fundamental — as it is through a politics of doing, sharing and storytelling, that we start to plant the seeds of possibility, and together, find ways to build back better.
For those of you who have been following our explorations into CANs, and trying to assemble your own CANs around the UK, we hope you find this as exciting and inspiring - and echoing - as we do.
We’re working our way through the material the Cape Town CANs are throwing up (see below), and will of course be hoping to network with them in due course. But at the very least, it’s a validation of our desire to think of capacious, supporting community structures that are much more creative, inclusive and direct than most existing forms of local and place-based government.
It also strikes us that the mnemonic of a CAN might filled, appropriately enough, with a variety of difference "C”s and “A”s, appropriate to each circumstance - community or citizen, action or agency. We’re cool about that, in the emergent spirit of the phenomenon itself.
In any case: Watch this container!
MORE ON THE CAPETOWN CANS
From SA’s Maverick Citizen: Putting the public back into public health: Communities organising solidarity responses to Covid-19:
The Connecting CAN from Cape Town Together meets at The Story Room, Khayelitsha. Photo: Leanne Brady
A few weeks after South Africa initiated its hard lockdown, 47% of households were suffering from extreme food insecurity.
Across Cape Town, CANs distributed food parcels and established community kitchens. With rapid communication across the network, CANs shared experience and resources, learned from each other and worked with public health services to follow Covid-19 safety protocols in the community kitchens.
Beyond the hot meals provided, the community kitchens became safe, organic spaces, enabling protective behaviours and information sharing. They responded to local social needs in a way that was inclusive, welcoming and free of stigma and shame.
The CANs generated community-level intelligence. In their inclusion of community members, researchers and local public servants, they enabled informal communication. They built trust between communities and health system actors through dialogue and co-learning forums between CANs and health sector decision-makers. They made input into educational materials developed by the health department.
With the lived local realities of those most affected by the pandemic often being very different from those of health department officials, these connections proved invaluable in framing appropriate measures.
The CANs aim to support and not substitute state efforts, which was initially possible. However, the shortcomings within state efforts became a subject of an increasingly politicised debate.
For example, some CANs and local civil society organisations formed a coalition that protested the unlawful eviction of residents in informal settlements. Political actors reacted by asserting that the CANs were acting unlawfully and presented a political threat.
When another CAN renovated a badly vandalised and unused public community hall, the local ward councillor accused them of unlawfully occupying the space.
From Stanford Social Innovation Review, Turning Short-Term Crisis Relief Into Longer-Term Social Innovation:
Muizenberg CAN volunteers work in the Muizenberg community kitchen, temporarily housed at the Blue Bird Market, a local goods market. (Photo by Patrick McKenna)
Civil society activists are envisioning markets that include more local value chains, characterized by solidarity and resilience as guiding principles, not just efficiency and competition.
Civil society groups are reconfiguring elements of their crisis response with this vision in mind. The Gugulethu CAN, for example, helped establish and supported a number of community kitchens in this mostly poor suburb of Cape Town, and some of them plan to continue operating longer-term.
At the same time, the CAN has been creating a vibrant network of food gardens that both supply produce to the community kitchens and sell to the market to raise funds.
The latter is supported by the Gugulethu CAN’s partnership with the CAN in Seaboard, a wealthier suburb, which is helping create customers. These kinds of food supply chains, localized by means of market transactions, are premised on not only efficiency, but also solidarity.
From Open Global Rights, Making a Community Action Net (work): organising in the times of COVID-19
(1) Focus on critical connections more than critical mass:
Relationships are the foundation of all our work. The quality and strength of these is more important than how many people are involved. In our current COVID context this has meant being conscious about how we create a caring online space.
We have done this in various ways. First, we try to cultivate one-on-one communication by welcoming people with individual messages to create a sense of connection from the start.
Second, by creating spaces to be human, we connect beyond just “doing”. Weekly online meetings allow us to hear each other's voices and see each other in our “natural habitats” (homes), making things more personal and human.
Third, we ask all members to type messages from a place of kindness, especially on WhatsApp, where tone, humour, and personality are sometimes difficult to convey.
Through all of this, we encourage practices for self-care and personal resilience. We can’t pour from an empty cup. We need to replenish what is used up by the constant onslaught of news, memes, and messages that our brains have to absorb, sort and act upon while simultaneously caring for our people, doing the work in our CAN, and holding down a day job. Balance is hard. This means encouraging each other to be patient and to respect people’s energetic limits and boundaries—making a guilt free zone for people to step back when they are feeling overwhelmed.
(2) Practice collective consciousness:
Community organising is primarily about the community, which means that it is really important to decentre the self. We want to create conditions for people to think collectively (not as individuals in a collective).
We are experimenting with creating collective values and “team agreements” that relate to our purpose and our vision. For example, our CAN WhatsApp group has clear guidelines outlining times when people can post (between 8am-6pm) and asking people not to post general news, articles, memes, and photos about COVID-19.
These terms of engagement were created and are moderated collectively. This creates collective responsibility for our group culture, helps people stay focused on the work, and prevents spamming of unnecessary information.
We think of our group administrators as “maps” rather than gatekeepers. That is, we aim to be conduits and not hoarders of contacts, information, love, connection, and wisdom. We often do this by connecting people who have similar interests (without interfering or mediating the relationship).
This has generated the formation of affinity networks, which are subgroups where people can have deeper discussions on specific issues and develop strategic plans and activities.
One example is the Sew4Safety group, which is a mask-making and distribution initiative that started out as an affinity group passionate about this topic. Another is the Feeding Scheme group that is mobilising volunteers, securing donations, and making daily food drop-offs for hundreds of people in the area.
We’ve learned quickly that a big community group is not necessarily the best space to host debates or make plans. But this means we have to make space for others’ ideas and for leadership to grow. If the leader is always there, there is no space for others to explore their ideas and their possibilities.
(3) Move at the speed of trust:
In organising, there is an instinct to move rapidly and respond with urgency, but when relationships are prioritised and centred, then trust becomes the metric that informs action.
This focus on trust means that we share responsibility by encouraging more people to take on co-leadership roles and administrate WhatsApp spaces, so the group is not just hearing one person’s voice. It means that we leave space for different people to answer questions, reminding ourselves there are other people better placed to answer if there is space for them to do so.
Also, we’ve learned that it is okay to leave some questions unanswered. And, finally, people will leave the group and we can’t take it personally. In fact, sometimes it might be a good thing for everyone.
Short note on Cape Town Together’s CANs from the European Community Psychology Association
Nancy Odendaal, University of Cape Town, South Africa: Recombining Place: COVID-19 and Community Action Networks in South Africa, International Journal of E-Planning Research, Volume 10 • Issue 2 • April-June 2021,
ESRC presentation, Cape Town Together, Community Action Networks (CANs) & sharing resources and learning