Women catalysing affordable and collaborative housing and neighbourhood models

Pictured here left to right is Zola, Maggie, Tracy, Sharon, Lynette.  Missing from the MYOH team are Pip and Deanna.

What do kangaroos, older women, housing, and contact dance have to do with each other?  They’ve all been part of my trip to Queensland Australia in September.

The Housing Older Women’s Movement contracted me to support them to roll out the My Home, Your Home, Our Homes community engagement series in SE QLD to catalyse affordable community-led housing. It was a successful and jam packed two weeks of events.

We’ve gotten fantastic feedback that the seminars and workshops have been informative, inspiring, interactive, empowering, and motivating. Each community group made a list of assets/enablers, many actions steps and policies to advocate for.  Ideally, we will see some pilot projects emerge from these efforts.

I presented at the Brisbane Quaker Meeting, Gold Coast, South Brisbane, North Brisbane, Sunshine Coast twice, at the University of Queensland and an in-house workshop for the Gold Coast City Council.

Participants have included Council staff, community-based organisations, social workers, women in need of housing, planners, small-scale developers, ecovillage pioneers, and others.  They felt fired up about housing justice, regenerative community development, economic fairness, resilient neighbourhoods, meeting older women’s needs, and more…

Community Land Trusts are the best way for a community and council to create retained affordability with housing (meaning that the house cannot get sold on the market and there is no capital gain). Many of the councils who participated either had it as part of their housing strategy or wish to investigate it further.

I hope NZ councils take an equally enthusiastic interest. I’m available to support NZ councils, Community Housing Providers, developers, and communities who wish to include more affordable and diverse housing options to their housing/future development strategies.

I’m grateful to the HOWM team for the funding for me to do this work and for their amazing job at organising my airfare, car, and accommodation as well as all the events, networking and publicity —which was a huge load of work.

In my spare time, I got to visit with my daughter Oriah as she was on holiday here, attend two contact dance jams, see a Brisbane Festival performance, join a playback theatre rehearsal, walk along the Brighton foreshore, attend the Brisbane Vegan Expo, had a tour of Crystal Waters ecovillage and saw kangaroo and wallabies and well-known facilitator Robin Clayfield. Now I’m in Byron Bay where I’ve visited a fellow ecovillage consultant and his community and enjoying this cute town and the nature all around. Last stop will be Narara Ecovillage where I’ll be hosted by the founder and a fellow Ecovillage Ambassador. 

To learn more about HOWM and the MYOH engagement series, I interview Maggie and Lynette on the Homefullness Show which you can find on podcast and YouTube, by audio or video.

If you’d like to explore how I could support your council and/or community to integrate more affordable and diverse housing options into your housing and development plans, book a meeting with me.