The Isivivana Centre (https://isivivanacentre.org.za) is a multi-purpose community centre based in the township of Khayelitsha. The Centre was established in 2016 to provide a space for social justice organisations to convene and collaborate and to provide resources to the surrounding community (including a library, cinema and meeting rooms). Development of the Centre was spearheaded by a group of social justice organisations working in Khayelitsha with funding from the Atlantic Philanthropies.
While not expressly a research organisation, the space serves as a site for community-based research. Current tenants of the building include a clinical trials platform (Vuka Research Clinic), a legal advocacy group working on education, a social justice organisation, a civil society health service provision organisation, and a public and community engagement organisation (Eh!woza). Each of these organisations either conducts or facilitates community-based research from within Isivivana, making research one of the centres’ core activities. The fact that the building is populated by a diversity of organisations is important to its ways of working. Practically, it also helps to address issues related to stigma for those who enter the building to participate in clinical trials or other research-related activities.
The building was designed and built with a specific set of outcomes and intentions in mind. While safe, with security stationed at entrances, the building is easily accessible from the outside – providing a feeling of openness to community members. The well-resourced and welcoming space makes an impact on how people feel while working in and accessing the space. As described by a senior leader at Isivivana, the resources and architecture are intended to convey that “people living in townships should have access to these kinds of spaces and resources, and ideas and opportunities”.
The building is intended to not only be a brick and mortar facility, but also one where tenants collaborate and programmes that serve the community are developed. The idea is that the Centres is more than just a building but is also a set of interactions and values centred around a commitment to social justice and local collaboration. As one interview participant put it, “Isivivana is the place where you go if you want to meet people in Khayelitsha.”
In terms of the governance of the centre, decisions are made by a diverse board of trustees, which includes some representatives from the community where the centre is based. The centre works to ensure sustainability by generating revenue from tenants and renting out their venues, rather than relying on external funding. This does mean, however, that the space is not freely available to other community-based organisations or actors without means to pay.
For researchers who work from within Isivivana, the space enables them to operate in a way that would not be possible from within a traditional tertiary institution. Most immediately, the physical proximity to research participants can facilitate more active dialogue and a deeper understanding of the everyday issues participants face, enabling a more responsive and engaged form of research. As one researcher based at Isisivana reflected,
“Working in this social justice space, that’s where you start to be aware of those issues. You see something in the community that you could help to address, synergising your research with this need/want. You start to see ways that you can offer other forms of help to the community where you operate.”
Researchers also reflected on how moving outside of the physical confines of large academic institutions facilitated less rigid and more flexible ways of working that allowed for more responsive and collaborative approaches to research.
A clear success of Isivivana has been the establishment and continuity of a multi-sectoral community-based space focused on social justice. More recently, there has been a shift toward more health-focused organisations within the space, largely due to relatively greater funding for health-related projects, redirecting its focus somewhat. However, it has remained fundamentally focused on community development in Khayelitsha.
At the same time, while some of the organisations who operate from within the space have a strong commitment to ensuring more effective service delivery for those involved in research, there is still work to be done to facilitate stronger linkages between the research activities that take place and the delivery of services (including health services) in the area.
One potential area for growth is that the centre does not have a clear strategy for measuring their impact. It would be valuable to examine more deeply how their values and commitments are realised in practice. For instance, while there is a clear expressed commitment to fostering collaboration between resident organisations, it is less clear how this happens in practice. It would also be valuable to understand more about how the space is experienced by different members of its community (staff at different tenant organisations, area residents, building staff, and leadership).
Other challenges include:
Although the centre is not a research organisation in itself, it offers an interesting model for how research can be more proximate to the people involved, and therefore more responsive to the needs and priorities of diverse communities. As described above, the clinical trials unit located within the Centre (Vuka) is deeply committed to the development of a more equitable and ethical model of community-based health research – and serves as an interesting case study in itself of how researchers can transform their ways of engaging communities even within the context of large-scale clinical trials.
A key takeaway of this case is about the importance of physical place and space in enabling (or disabling) meaningful and inclusive knowledge exchange. At Isivivana, the interaction between the architecture and resources of the space and how it functions within the community is a key element of its success. A well-resourced and open and welcoming centre makes a huge difference to how people feel while working in and accessing the space. At the same time, the feeling of openness is not determined only by the physical infrastructure but instead shaped by the values and practices of the people who make up the space.
Reflecting on the possibility of scaling models like Isivivana, one of the centre’s tenants reflected:
“The way it was set up was so organic. It emerged through an organic need of a group of NGOs that were already working in the community and needed space to operate. If you tried to replicate it in another setting, I’m not sure if it would have the same success. Things that emerge organically are far more successful than those that are put there by an external actor.”