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About Us
The Community Organisation Resource Centre has been fully operational since March 2002. For the first three years of its existence the Resource Centre was involved only in the facilitation of learning through exchange programmes to grassroots communities involved in innovative development. These communities were almost always affiliated to either the Coalition of the Urban Poor (CUP) or the the Alliance of Rural Communities (ARC).
Most innovations derived from the activities of the major social movement affiliated to both these grassroots networks – the Federation of the Urban Poor (FEDUP).
During this initial period the Resource Centre developed a series of professional support programmes to work with these two grassroots networks of the Urban and Rural Poor. These programmes have all been responses to needs and priorities that have been articulated by these networks. These programmes are:
- Co-Connected (support specifically for rural communities in ecotourism, sustainable land use, land claims and sustainable rural development)
- Community Micro Finance Network (savings and finance);
- Enumerations (grassroots information gathering and application for resource allocation and people-centred development)
- Land Programme (tenure and land use management);
- New Media for Social Change (video, photography, documentation).
- People’s Environmental Planning (alternative housing technology);
- Sizakuyenza (Health, HIV/AIDS and the creation of safe social and physical space for women, children and concerned men).
- Urban Environment Programme (water, sanitation, energy, waste management and sustainable urban development);
In the beginning the Resource Centre gave more attention and support to urban poor communities. This was a result of its historical origins in the urban sector. It was not long before communities in rural and peri-urban areas began to link up with some of the Resource Centre programmes. Programme leaders soon began to realize that they needed to function outside and beyond the developmental stereotype of separate rural and urban realities. The Resource Centre realized that urban and rural were part of the same continuum, and were pulled together by the very process of urbanization that was meant to separate them. The Resource Centre programmes began to support both CUP and ARC affiliates, and the two grassroots networks themselves began to interact on a regular basis.
In 2005 the Resource Centre dropped the word “urban” from its name and became the Community Organisation Resource Centre (CORC), reflecting the fundamental shift that has gradually been taking place in the agency and is more in keeping with its core functions and activities.
CORC continues to provide active support to communities of the urban poor, and its partner network at grassroots level, the Coalition of the Urban Poor, has grown from strength to strength.
At the same time through Co-Connected, the network of rural communities –ARC - has begun to scale up its activities, especially in the coastal regions, from the Western Cape to Kwa-Zulu Natal.
More significantly these two networks have begun to collaborate around learning, advocacy and the seeding of projects. This collaboration has taken institutional form with the two networks being represented on a grassroots committee by the name of Phila-Ngokuzenzela that identifies and seeds small green and brown projects at community level.
In response to this development, all the organizations in the CORC stable have agreed to place a primary emphasis on green and brown development issues. What is more CORC will endeavour to seek to integrate green issues such as bio-diversity, food gardens, and sustainable land use management with brown issues such as alternative housing technologies, water, sanitation, waste management, energy and transportation.
The building of social movements through learning and sharing of experience remains the primary methodology to be employed by all agencies in the CORC family. This continues to be regarded as the driving force for socially, economically and environmentally sustainable development.
CORC has sharpened its mission statement accordingly so that it reads as follows:
CORC is a nucleus for professionals and grassroots activists who think independently yet plan and act collectively. It is the hub of a new synergy between intellectual pioneers and collective action. CORC provides support to networks of urban and rural poor communities who mobilize themselves around their own resources and capacities. CORC’s interventions are designed to enable rural and urban communities to learn from one another and to create solidarity and unity in order to be able to broker deals with formal institutions especially the State. The entry points for such interventions will be the creation of community-based centres for learning, where communities and their partners are engaged in development activities that green the brown agenda and brown the green agenda.
What are these Community-based Centres of Learning?
From 2002 to 2004 the CORC programmes restricted their support to learning and lobbying through horizontal exchange. Since March 2005 the Centre has been driven to expand its activities in response to the success of these learning and lobbying programmes.
CUP and Co-Connected began to signal that the exchange programmes facilitated by the Resource Centre were generating solidarity, knowledge, capacity and enthusiasm, but that if there was no follow-through resulting in tangible development projects, then these gains were going to evaporate.
The leaders of the Resource Centre programmes responded to this development by agreeing that in addition to supporting CUP and ARC, they would take on the responsibility of capacitating and “training” professional support organizations as well.
This can happen in three distinct ways.
When exchange programmes lead to the identification of tangible projects for Co-Conected or CUP affiliates then CORC will establish whether
- the project is to be handed over to existing service delivery organizations who have direct relationships with CUP affiliates (e.g. uTshani Fund, Community Resource Organisation, ex Urban Sector Network groups);
- there is a need to set up a dedicated project management team not related to any existing support organization;
- the project is small and manageable enough to be handled by CORC itself.
In the event that a project is handed over to an existing service delivery organization CORC will always offer additional technical support. The service delivery organization will be under no obligation to accept this support. However the emerging project will automatically become a CORC Centre for Learning and CORC programmes will facilitate regular exchanges to and from the development.
In the event that a dedicated project management team is set up, the CORC programmes will mediate the relationship between the professionals on the team and the community committees that will have responsibility over different aspects of the development. They will also manage the relationship between communities and outside formal institutions.
For a list of current or pending projects use the PROJECTS navigation menu at the top of the page. For a quick overview about these projects go to Projects Overview. To view all projects go to All Projects.