About The Community Organisation Resource Centre

The Community Organisation Resource Centre (CORC) is a nucleus for professionals and grassroots activists who think independently yet plan and act collectively. It is the hub of a new synergy between intellectual pioneers and collective action. CORC provides support to networks of urban and rural poor communities who mobilize themselves around their own resources and capacities. CORC's interventions are designed to enable these communities to learn from one another and to create solidarity and unity in order to be able to broker deals with formal institutions especially the State. The entry points for such interventions are community-based centres for learning. These are settlements whose residents are involved in the incremental provision of land tenure, basic services and affordable housing – either through acceptable relocations or on-site upgrading. At these centres CORC  and their community partners attempt to set precedents that transform the way all stakeholders think and act in response to the urbanization of poverty.

CORC provides support to two different types of community networks. The first are networks of informal settlements that are mobilized around specific issues: normally, land, evictions, basic services and citizenship. The second are women’s collectives that are mobilized through savings. They try to bring a qualitative change to the way in which the organisations in the issue-based networks respond to the urbanization of poverty.

CORC supports issue-based networks in five metropolitan areas in the country and in one heavily populated rural district in the Eastern Cape. The communities in the urban networks come together to form the Informal Settlement Network (ISN).  There are networks in the greater Johannesburg area, Ethekwini, Nelson Mandela Metro, Cape Town and Mangaung. The rural communities have come together to form the Alliance of Rural Communities (ARC).

CORC’s primary grassroots partner is the Federation of the Urban Poor (FEDUP).  This is a national network of women’s savings collectives that has mobilized extensively in informal settlements in all nine provinces. FEDUP has a loose alliance with another savings network known as Poor People’s Movement (PPM).  PPM is most active in Namaqualand and the Northern Cape but has expanded into several other provinces.