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Josie Orkin Adler

South Africa- Johannesburg
Josie Adler’s commitment to building strong civil society was founded in her family’s background as immigrants and refugees, developed in her studies in Social Anthropology, Sociology, African Government, Classics and law, and inspired by the community organizing principles of the Chicago organiser Saul Alinsky reflecting that “Power is taken not given”.
In South Africa’s anti-apartheid context from the 1960’s her volunteer activities ranged from organizing student work camps (SHAWCO) building classrooms in rural areas and neighbouring states, arranging a project of high school students constructing over 4000 desks for Soweto classrooms (WITSCO), working with teenage girls on a mission station in Lesotho, setting up urban food projects (Kupugani), and participating in the project to publish the first national account of forced removals (“The Discarded People”, 1968). She co-ordinated the Prison Education Scheme to provide for studies for the political prisoners on Robben Island, at Pretoria Central and other prisons (1963-1975). A committee member from 1971 in the Black Sash women’s anti-apartheid organization, she co-chaired the Forced Removals Group opposing rural land dispossession, and established the Urban Removals and Homelessness Group. From 1987 she served on the committee of the Witwatersrand Network for the Homeless.
From 1980-1992 her work in three organizations focused on homelessness, land and housing, organizing urban resistance by shackdwellers to force government’s release of 100 000 informal settlement sites in formerly exclusively ‘white’ peri-urban areas around Johannesburg.
From 1985-1997 she organized with rural women to establish Bambanani Creches Association, a federation of rural women running 13 creches at Driefontein, Mpumalanga, the first rural freehold area to secure reprieve through community resistance to forced removal by government.
She became a full-time professional community organizer in 1986, first at the radical ecumenical Wilgespruit Fellowship Centre and then in the Interfaith Community Development Association (ICDA). In these organisations her mentor/colleague for two decades was Ishmael Mkhabela. Her work has included research (formal and participatory) and leadership and organisation development, training and mentoring in a broad range of contexts relating to urban settlers, in informal settlements, townships and the inner city.
During South Africa’s transforming election in 1994 she conducted a quantitative research project to assess fairness/bias in the media for the European Union. She has interacted at provincial and local levels of government, in the business sector and communities, including immigrants and refugees.
As a consultant since 2004 she worked with the Johannesburg Housing Company, a lead social housing company, to found the eKhaya Neighbourhood City Improvement District, an association of property owners and housing managers. eKhaya’s model of regeneration in the dense, badly run-down Hillbrow area is nurturing a thriving inner city low-income residential neighbourhood in Johannesburg based on the conviction that sustainable urban regeneration has 3 equal components viz. social cohesion, infrastructure upgrade & maintenance, and good urban management of crime-and-grime. She is now working to extend understanding and practice of this model of urban development.

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