Cape Town - As winter hit Cape Town with a bang on Monday night, Community Chest CEO Lorenzo Davids reached out to some of the city's most vulnerable residents to offer them shelter from the elements.
Capetonians were battered by strong winds, heavy rainfall and freezing temperatures on Monday and with the national lockdown in place, many of the places homeless people would ordinarily have turned to for a meal or a few hours of shelter, were simply not available to them.
So Davids, a vocal advocate for the city's homeless, took matters into his own hands and invited them to spend the night at the Community Chest's offices.
In a video posted to Facebook by Gino Mzansi Solomon, Davids said his team was "honoured" to invite the group to spend the night in their offices.
"We're very honoured as the Community Chest tonight to take in as our special guests, our very honoured guests, 180 homeless people who will sleep in our boardrooms, on our floors, in our building, wherever they can find a space to protect them from this howling wind, this darn cold weather. You have the rain that's belting down and I'm going to have some wonderful guests tonight."
The video ends with a message to all South Africans.
"That's the kind of country we should be building. That's the kind of space we should all be living in. That's the new consciousness the president was talking about. That's the new society we want.That's the human being we should all become," Davids said.