Citizen Relationship and Urban Management involves residents
Region A CRUM has been hard at work cleaning, maintaining streets and flora life, while educating the community on how to care for their facilities.
Citizen Relationship and Urban Management (CRUM) is an entity of the City of Joburg that is tasked with educating and assisting residents with service delivery-related issues while its AFS (Augmented Field Services) programme does the hands-on work of day-to-day service delivery needs.
According to Assistant Director of Citizen Relationship Management Pierre Nel, “An educated community is an informed and caring community which is a vital part of the success of CRUM. It is essential that our residents stay informed about the city policies, events, public meetings, what services and infrastructure they get for their rates and taxes, and how to treat and look after the infrastructure. And to address this, we run an education and awareness campaign every week in different wards, rotating to all the wards twice per year.”
Ward 94 councillor David Foley commended the team for their hard work and commitment to educating residents about community participation. “CRUM has had a number of education sessions in the ward over the past year where all departments participate to show their areas of expertise.”
According to Nel, they aim to broaden the community’s understanding of city programmes, policies and initiatives and to inform residents about how to access city services. “It is of vital importance that the community looks after the city’s infrastructure, contributes and owns it as it is simple actions like not putting large objects in stormwater drains that cause other issues, don’t drive over pavements, don’t damage any infrastructure,” said Nel.
About two years ago, the city created the AFS to be administered by CRUM. AFS is tasked with travelling through the different regions daily and doing clean-ups. Their duties include cutting grass, sweeping the streets, picking up litter, removal of weeds, stormwater distilling, and removing stickers or pamphlets from the street infrastructure just to mention a few.
It’s not only a service delivery programme designed to augment work by the city’s entities and departments, but it also ensures that the teams act as city ambassadors on the ground and augment visible service delivery in their assigned wards while CRUM educates the community to keep the city clean and to look after its infrastructure.
“Residents engage and learn a lot from the teams and I work closely with the AFS team weekly to address areas to be cleaned in the ward from my observations as well as from residents. General work is sand removal and litter picking, and residents can always help the team with tools such as rakes, spades, brooms, and more,” said Ward 94 councillor David Foley.
CRUM urges the community to report and log service delivery issues with the following number: 0860 562 874 and the anti-fraud hotline: 0800 002 587 Anti-fraud hotline.
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