About Us – Community Cohesion

About Us

Community Cohesion

Community Cohesion is a registered NPC (Non-Profit Company). Our Head Office is in Hout Bay and we currently operate in Hout Bay, Ocean View, Masiphumele, Fish Hoek, Simonstown, Drakenstein (Thuthuzela Care Centre Paarl), Victoria Hospital Forensic Unit Catchment area and Woodstock.

Our guiding principle is: Not for, but with. We do not do anything for our clients; we inform 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 do this by providing psycho-social support, education and training. This translates into one on one Social Worker Therapeutic Intervention, Crisis Containment and Wide-Ranging Counselling, Group de-briefs, supported group work and workshops to improve life skills.

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

Our Mission

We have a Mission to provide Rights Based Psycho-Social support to nurture actively engaged citizens to enable them to break the cycles of violence prevalent in our society.

We plan to achieve this through:

Rights Based Therapeutic Social Work and Specialised Counselling;

one on one crisis containment at the point of trauma.

practical advice and assistance in accessing relevant referral agency services.

Therapeutic Group work

Education and Psycho-Social workshops in the communities we serve

Our Vision

We have a Vision of a South Africa where all our citizens are afforded access to quality, Rights Based Therapeutic social work and psycho-social services, so that they are able to realise their potential, irrespective of their socio-economic situation.

Where we realise the emotional impact of our violent past and present, and make use of services available to start to deal with the impact of this violence.

Our Mandate

Increasing resilience in high risk communities through therapeutic intervention with adult victims of crime and violence and their family members/ significant others- individual/couple/family therapeutic groups (services rendered by social worker)

A victim of crime refers to any person who requests assistance from a service centre following direct or indirect victimisation.

Indirect victimisation includes witnesses to a crime as well as the direct victim’s family or friends who may be negatively impacted by the crime, be it current or historic.

Ongoing training

As much as we conduct training for other community groups and NGO’s, we constantly develop our skills at our team debriefs. We get to discuss our cases as well as the challenges and successes we have in our different service delivery areas.

There are constant amendments to the variety of Acts we operate under and we need to be up to date so we can continue to provide our Rights Based direct services to our clients.

There is the also the critically important Victim Support Services Bill which is up for discussion before it is tabled before Parliament. There are many good things about this proposed VSS Bill, but there are equal amounts of problematic issues with the Bill. At these workshops, we discuss the key points and put forward our objections to national government.

https://www.gov.za/documents/victim-support-services-bill-draft-7-aug-2020-0000

see the link to the proposed Bill above.

As the team has a variety of specialised skills, everyone takes turns to share their knowledge and to prepare specific topics for the workshops.

Focus topics for Educational Workshops

Clients per month in Hout Bay, Ocean View, Masiphumelele, Red Hill, Fish Hoek, Simonstown, Drakenstein (Thuthuzela Care Centre Paarl), Victoria Hospital Forensic Unit Catchment area and surrounds

Professional Staff

Clients assisted in Houtbay Fire in one month