Chris Giles

Chris Giles is helping South African communities restore hope and facilitate development through a unique series of civic revitalization efforts.

In the wake of apartheid's atrocities, many in South Africa are unable to see a better future. They cannot find the optimism to support personal initiative, much less collective action. Chris sees that the country's political and social history of violence and destruction means that people, families, and by extension, townships are stymied in their efforts to form a collective vision and pursue it with hope and determination.
With a deep understanding of the problems many South Africans face, Chris has, over the past decade, introduced civic revitalization efforts that restore stability and economic possibility to communities. He does not strive for quick fixes, but instead offers a well-organized, practical plan for re-creating healthy townships. Chris helps people work together to plan community events, start small-scale businesses, design schools, and build recreation centers. In the process, participants learn new skills, earn an income, reconnect with neighbors, and gain a sense of public pride and public accountability. The framework Chris introduces helps to establish communities as self-sufficient and demonstrates to members who have suffered through the violence and destruction of apartheid that they can trust their neighbors and work together to envision, then achieve, positive outcomes. Using the lessons learned from Manenburg, Chris is now applying the same framework in rural communities in the Northern, Southern, Eastern, and Western Cape. His model is attracting attention internationally as well.

During the years of the struggle against apartheid, some metropolitan areas in South Africa resisted the rampant infringement of human rights more strongly than others, and subsequently they experienced greater devastation. Horrific massacres, arson, and physical assault were some of the visible manifestations of such retribution. But the invisible and more insidious effect still present today is the psychological destruction of community spirit. With the end of formal apartheid, these communities are wracked by an overwhelming sense of rootlessness and ennui. As a result, drug abuse and other forms of social decay are prevalent.
The suburb of Manenberg in Cape Town is one such depressed area. Investigations reveal that most children there are born to single parents, nearly three-quarters of the adult population are unemployed, and a third of teenagers at the local high schools feel that life is not worth living. Eight out of 10 children start primary school without the necessary skills to benefit from formal education, and the suburb has one of the highest rates of public violence and assault in Cape Town.
Traditional psychological interventions employed to address the problem are insufficient because they assume that the problem lies with the individual, or perhaps a given subunit in a community, and that the wider society is essentially healthy. But in Manenberg, as in many other regions across South Africa, this is not the case. Individual problems only scratch the surface of a much deeper, wider, and long-standing depression.
In response to the problem, government representatives have made a host of promises to Manenberg residents and to other similarly affected communities, but these remain largely unfulfilled. During election periods, there is often a feverish pitch of rhetoric that offers visions of rejuvenated communities if a particular candidate is elected. As is the case elsewhere, such talk remains only rhetoric because once in office, elected representatives suddenly become more beholden to their party than to their constituency. With the next elections, the cycle of throwaway promises and misplaced hopes starts again.

Chris realizes that the first step in overcoming the past within psychologically depressed communities is to engage with the past since it is important to acknowledge the impact that history always has on the present. When Chris started Selfhelp Manenberg to address these issues in the dispirited, but not atypical, township of Manenberg, he encouraged a slow process of communicating about the past. Making himself available at all times to listen to people's stories, he committed to a long journey with residents. Many came to see Chris because they wanted quick solutions to their problems or temporary economic relief. Each month, Chris would return visits and encourage residents to join a long-term development process from which all could benefit. He started holding monthly meetings, where people were encouraged to talk to each other, to find ways they could help each other, and to describe a picture of a preferred future.
Four months after Selfhelp Manenberg began, Manenberg residents had developed a business plan. They created a business that would sell T-shirts in order to raise money for a Christmas treat. This was the first of the suburb's Healing Businesses–small businesses designed to counter economic despair and run as profit-making therapy–which have grown to include other ventures like sewing, catering, and direct selling. Even though these businesses are not particularly profitable, Chris knows that even the smallest business activity is an important expression of hope. A reliable source of income, however small, is an important step to help residents build not only financial assets but also the moral and ethical assets essential to civic establishment.This process of community dialogue and the development of vision-driven action plans have resulted in a number of other community-building activities within the suburb, each underpinned by economic support from the Healing Businesses. These activities are facilitated by staff from Selfhelp Manenberg and are focused on such areas as parenting and early childhood development, youth development, skills development, and accountability. Each focus area has a program manager and four project managers, who together are responsible for a project within that field and the interaction with appropriate networks and community groups. The programs work with people of all ages and at all levels of civil society–the individual, family, organization, local network, and area forum. Program participants hold officeholders accountable, whether they are citizen or political leaders. All projects work together to achieve each program's goals and vision, and in turn the programs all work together to achieve an overall dream for revitalization of the wider area.
Over the last decade, Selfhelp Manenberg has worked intensively with 3,000 residents–and over 17,000 indirectly–through events, public meetings, and talking groups. At the end of 2001, the Healing Businesses provided employment to 27 people.
Chris is actively planning to spread his approach of civic revitalization to other suburbs in Cape Town. To do this effectively, he sees that he will have to become an independent neighborhood development facilitator in order to catalyze the process in each place. He will start with at least six suburbs similar to Manenberg, where he will be able to use the lessons from the last decade of working in civic development.
For stimulating wider metropolitan restoration, Chris believes that the Healing Businesses underpinning the process ought to be commensurate with their geographic location. Accordingly, Chris has identified three large income-generation opportunities to support this next level of a scaled-up vision. The first is the establishment of the Cape Care Route–a tourist route of recovering districts–to be developed in partnership with the Cape Town City Council, which also sees this as an exercise in crime reduction. Again in partnership with the City Council, the second is the building of a convention center. There is an obligation for the authorities to give as much of this work as possible to people who have been previously disadvantaged. Lastly, Chris is working to develop a recreational youth center on a 120-acre piece of land that belongs to the people of Manenberg. With multiuses, this center will be a place where children can grow up healthy in the middle of the city and learn a range of skills. Chris also predicts that it will be a major tourist attraction.
Selfhelp Manenberg will also play an important role in spreading civic revitalization in the City of Cape Town. The organization has applied for National Qualifications Framework accreditation to be a "learning center" for civic revitalization. Once accredited, civic leaders from other suburbs and cities will be able to visit the area and benefit from the lessons of the last decade. The organization will also conduct civic exchanges with other needy communities to share their learning and spread beyond Cape Town. Some Manenberg residents have already participated in a civic exchange with a North Carolina city in the United States.

As Chris grew up on a farm in a desolate but topographically stunning region of South Africa called the Karoo, he had a nagging sense that he was not quite at "home" with his surroundings. This feeling of discomfort had much to do with the abominable levels of oppression that he witnessed inflicted upon black South Africans and indeed found self-inflicted upon the psyches of white South Africans. Thus, when he finished secondary school, he traveled to the U.K. where he enrolled in a psychology program. Back in South Africa seven years later, Chris began working in a children's home in exchange for a place to stay, while validating his qualifications to the South African authorities. Living with unloved children was a challenging experience, and the realization was dawning on him that his formal postgraduate psychology education was not adequate to address the needs of these children and their parents.
Moving on to work as a consulting psychologist for the Cape Town Child Welfare Society, Chris was still asking the question: What would lessen the harsh realities faced by the poor, and how could a psychologist truly be helpful? Ten years of learning and investigating the answer to this question ensued. He became the head of the Child Protection Services, as well as the chairperson of many societies and organizations dealing with the issue of child protection and safety. He was considered an expert witness on legal cases involving horrific atrocities. Over the years he came to realize that he and his well-trained team were dealing–at best–with only the symptoms of the real problems. It was the economic and social realities, and the severe and widespread hopelessness within the country, that ensured the never-ending stream of tragedies and wrecked lives.
Chris began looking for a way of working that would make sense in the South African context. His insight was that to have genuine impact within South Africa, whole groups of people would need to be helped and given hope for the future. He felt that within all his previous positions, he had taken individual psychological work as far as he could. Now was the time for working with groups, and not just small groups, but huge groups–whole communities. He began to look at community development models that offered more hope of successfully addressing the scale of human need than the country's history had produced.