You Winsome, you lose some: Home and hospitality in the Northern Rivers

Grayson Cooke,Jim Hearn

doi:10.5130/ijcre.v8i1.4035

Abstract

The Home Project was a three-year collaborative research project, established through a partnership between Northern Rivers Performing Arts (NORPA) and the School of Arts and Social Sciences (SASS) at Southern Cross University (SCU). The Home Project’s objective was to raise awareness of homelessness in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales through creative arts practice and community engagement activities. The broad project aims were to explore questions of home, homelessness and belonging in Northern Rivers’ communities; to address the experiences of individuals affected by homelessness; and, where appropriate, to provide avenues for public dissemination of the stories of individuals who are or have been without a home. This article discusses the activities undertaken in each year of the project, providing a case study of a community engaged research project involving collaboration between university staff and students, a performing arts organisation and a community service provider. We analyse the development of the project over the three years and discuss the emergence of the theme of ‘hospitality’, which came to frame the project in its latter stages as we focused our activities at the Winsome Hotel, a Heritage listed and iconic Australian hotel that now offers low-cost daily lunches and a short-term accommodation service for marginalised men. This focus on the Winsome Hotel and hospitality gave us, as researchers, a new way to think about the provision of services to people without a home.Keywords: Homelessness, hospitality, creative arts practice, community engagement, NORPA, Southern Cross University

Highlights

The Home Project’s objective was to raise awareness of homelessness in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales through creative arts practice and community engagement activities
EVALUATION AND CONCLUSION As we have noted above, we focused on the Winsome as a kind of cipher for the issues surrounding homelessness, in an attempt to gain greater traction and to link homelessness to a related issue and cause felt very strongly in the community
The love the Lismore community felt for the Winsome, and the loss they felt when it ceased operating as a venue for live music and parties, constituted a kind of homelessness for the community members, a complication of place identity and attachment

Summary

Introduction

The Home Project’s objective was to raise awareness of homelessness in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales through creative arts practice and community engagement activities. A key aspect of this positive effect is the active, practical nature of creative arts – they require individuals to engage with new knowledge, to learn new skills and to collaborate with others, and in that sense to produce change within their lives and contribute to social inclusion (Mulligan, Scanlon & Welch 2008).

Results

Conclusion