Student Experiences

The Communiversity serves as a portal to the world, opening doors, minds, hearts and hopes for a promising future.

• One of the most difficult outcomes of growing up without educational or financial opportunities and resources is the lack of access to the larger community. Your world becomes whatever is happening in your room, your street or at best, in your community. With the internet, all this has changed but without a computer or a smart phone to awaken the connections and/or a chance for further training and/or relevant education, you are still cut off from the world.
• Then there are the financial, social and emotional results of being cut off. You generally feel like a failure, especially if you have passed exams that you thought would enable you to go to college or to get a decent job and you are rejected over and over. Your vision for the future shrinks. You lose hope. You stay in your room with nothing to do, or worse, enter into the world that is available — such as the world of drugs and crime.
• Nearly all Communiversity students come from the most vulnerable Cape Town communities and schools. And, as was mentioned earlier, to add to their concerns, the vast majority had previously applied to the local institutions of higher education and been rejected. Along with those rejections, it seems that almost every student’s educational journey started with real difficulty.
• Most students entering the Communiversity enter with stories reflecting the above situations. However, within the few months, they generally report that their lives are totally changed.