Community Cohesion

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+27 61 683 6943

Community Cohesion is a registered NPC with our Head Office in Hout Bay.

We are key stakeholder partners of the Department of Social Development (DSD) under their Social Crime Prevention Program, specifically in their Victim Empowerment Program. All of this translates into providing psycho-social development, training, education and support with the objective of building family and personal resilience.

Victim Empowerment Program

We use the UN Victim Charter as our point of departure, underpinned by the socio-economic realities of our country. Our model consists of:

  • Social Workers, Auxiliary Social Workers: assess and devise the therapeutic intervention as to the specific needs of the client and their family. This could mean practical and legislative advice, accessing grants, preparation for court, sectioning and removals of at risk individuals, admission to rehab facilities, access to feeding schemes etc. The SW’s then assign the client(s) a Counselor from our organisation.
  • Trained Trauma and Victim Support Counselors: to address the post traumatic therapeutic needs of the clients and their families and to enable them to work towards real empowerment through therapy and implementing strategies to break the cycle of victimhood and violence. Counselling is also provided for clients suffering from secondary trauma not crime specific, but related to the stressors they experience in their lives, including family mediation sessions.
  • Psycho-social educators and trainers: to prevent the crises that cause the need for therapeutic intervention through educating around life skills and interpersonal communication. We encourage all our clients to attend these training sessions as part of their therapy.
  • Community workers: to be the eyes on the ground to identify the problems before they become critical.

We receive a contribution towards running our VEP Program from the DSD as in they pay the salaries of our Social Workers; we need to source additional funding to cover our Counselors, Trainers and Group Facilitators and other running costs of the organisation.

Each month we provide therapeutic intervention to on average 25 new cases (individuals and their families) in each area we work, at no cost to the clients. We run monthly group sessions in each area as well with the focus on “Personal Development” and “Anger Management and Conflict Resolution”, again at no charge to the client.

Our guiding principle is: Not for, but with. We do not do anything for our client’s; we educate them as to their rights and responsibilities and walk the path with them to claiming those rights, ultimately enabling them to take ownership of their lives.

We firmly believe that we should not be seeing the next generation of the clients we are currently seeing.

Volunteer needs: we need an Afrikaans speaking Counselor to assist with our Hout Bay caseload.

Bronwyn Moore

Director, Community Cohesion

bronwyn@communitycohesion.co.za / 061 683 6943