Karen

Karen Hendricks is a housing activist, a feminist, and a mother. She is raising a teenage son and caring for her aging father — both, simultaneously, from inside Cissie Gool House, the former Woodstock Hospital that she and close to 900 other people have occupied since 2017 after being displaced from the neighbourhoods their families built over generations.

She did not set out to become a public voice on Cape Town's housing crisis. She set out to find somewhere to live. The activism came from the eviction.

Karen speaks about care — who provides it, who is expected to provide it, and why women in her community carry the weight of holding families together in circumstances that most people in this city never have to imagine. She speaks about what it means to be from Woodstock and Salt River, to have five generations of your family rooted in a place, and to watch that place transform into something your family can no longer afford. She speaks about what a city owes the people who made it.

She is one of the most articulate, grounded, and honest voices in Cape Town on what tourism, gentrification, and the short-term rental market are actually doing to real people's lives.

You will sit down with Karen for a conversation.

Not a presentation. Not a walking tour of someone else's trauma. A conversation: small group, real questions, honest answers — in a Cape Town space where two hours can change how you read the entire city you thought you'd come to visit.

Karen will tell you about the housing crisis from the inside. About Woodstock becoming an urban redevelopment zone in 2007 and what that actually meant for the people who lived there. About the short-term rental that now occupies the home her family lived in for generations. About the spatial geography of Cape Town — the rule, never quite stated, that the poorer you are, the further you get pushed from the centre.

She will also tell you about resistance. About what it takes to organise 900 people. About why women are almost always at the centre of that kind of work, and almost never credited for it.

This is not a comfortable encounter. It is not meant to be. But it is one of the most important conversations you can have about this city — and Karen is one of the very few people qualified to lead it.