communityfix.org
Let's put our skills to work.
The community is actively working on these issues:
#00052Off-grid coastal and island communities cannot sustain conventional desalination for safe drinking water
Coastal, island, and remote communities sit beside seawater but lack safe drinking water. Conventional desalination (RO, thermal) requires reliable power, capital, trained technicians, and supply chains they don't have — and discharges brine that harms local ecosystems.
#00046Voluntary used-clothing collection collapses when the resale market that secretly funds it fails
Clothing banks look free but are secretly funded by selling the reusable fraction, mostly exported. When export demand collapsed and ultra-fast-fashion flooded banks with unsellable items, each container flipped to a loss — causing operators to quietly withdraw, ending the servic
#00044Social isolation of the elderly
As the proportion of older people in the community grows, more people are affected by issues such as social isolation, lack of mental stimulation, and loss of physical independence.
#00034Large-scale tropical deforestation driven mostly by illegal land clearing for agriculture and mining
Across tropical forest nations, most clearing is illegal and tied to cattle, soy/palm, land-grabbing, and mining. It is profitable, remote, hard to police, and weakly enforced when political will lapses — progress is real but reversible.
#00030Household food scraps make up a large, costly share of residual municipal waste
Organic food waste is roughly a third of household residual waste. Collected mixed with general waste it is heavy, wet, and expensive to truck and incinerate. France made household biowaste sorting mandatory in 2024 — but curbside collection adds its own routes, bins and treatme…
#00016Liquid personal-care products are sold almost exclusively in single-use plastic bottles
Shampoo, conditioner, body wash and liquid soap are overwhelmingly packaged in single-use plastic bottles that are rarely recycled. The format persists because plastic is cheap, light, unbreakable and water-resistant, and supply chains are built around it — no alternative yet be…
#00014Homelessness in Cape Town
An estimated 14,000+ people sleep rough or in temporary shelters across Cape Town, driven by job loss, mental illness, eviction, addiction and structural housing exclusion. Municipal response oscillates between law-enforcement displacement and small-scale NGO provision — neither
#00005Vulnerable residents are invisible during extreme-weather events
In heatwaves, cold snaps and outages, isolated elderly, mobility-limited, and medically dependent residents are often invisible to neighbors and services — so danger is found only after a missed check-in, while privacy concerns make a naive registry its own hazard.
#00004Recurring street flooding from overwhelmed or clogged storm drainage
Specific streets and low points flood repeatedly in heavy rain — from clogged drains or drainage never sized for today's storm intensity — causing recurring property damage and access hazards that stay below the threshold for major capital fixes.
#00003Urban heat islands leave some neighborhoods dangerously hotter than others
Dense, low-canopy, dark-surfaced neighborhoods run several degrees hotter than nearby areas during heatwaves, concentrating health risk and energy costs — and the burden falls hardest on low-income districts least able to adapt.
#00001Communities keep re-solving the same local problems from scratch
Knowledge of which civic interventions actually work is scattered across PDFs, news clippings, council minutes and individual experts' heads. A community facing a problem another community already solved has no practical way to find that — so it re-invents the approach, and ofte…