City’s long strides in assisting vagrants

I WOULD like to respond to Ms Pat Eddy’s “challenge” to the City and other organisations to do more to assist street people in the Cape Town CBD (“Decrease the number of homeless”, June 22, page 10).

I am surprised Ms Eddy is unaware of the City’s provision of assistance to street people and the winter readiness programme. Our Street People Strategy is well thought through and based on in-depth research into the reasons contributing to people living on the street and hearing from them what assistance would be most beneficial in helping to be reintegrated back into their families.

We are continuing to learn and respond to the needs of street people and I have just recently initiated greater involvement from the City’s Health Department in treating and referring street people who find themselves in poor physical and mental health.

We have openly shared this information and our learnings with the CCID and other organisations so that a network of assistance can be provided to some of society’s most vulnerable.

I have personally been on a number of integrated operations with the City’s Street People’s Reintegration Team, together with CCID members. I trust our work with the CCID will continue and I look forward to meeting Ms Eddy on one of these operations to better introduce her to our comprehensive strategy. Here is a summary as to the many undertakings of the City in assisting street people:

·Facilitating assistance, including access to shelters, social and medical services, temporary work opportunities through the Expanded Public Works Programme, reunification with the family.

·The establishment of 20 Local Networks of Care in communities at risk. The networks’ role is to prevent people from migrating to the streets by running programmes focused on issues in the home, truancy, substance abuse and to provide support to street people who are reintegrated into their communities to prevent a return to their former life.

·Investing more than R700 000 in aid each year for the winter readiness programme so that shelters can accommodate more street people.

·Running the Give Responsibly campaign to deter hand-outs and instead encourage donations to organisations that assist street people in the long-term.

·Establishing Cape Town’s first Safe Space to make it possible for people sleeping on the street in the CBD to be provided with basic shelter and ablutions.

·Provision of prefabricated structures to homeless shelters to enable an increase in their capacity to shelter more people. ALDERMAN JP SMITH City of Cape Town