Grant Winners October 2007

The Wellfairies run a specialist holistic welfare service at festivals, helping to unclog medical teams from non-urgent cases, calm and treat people, and reduce hospital admissions and evictions from a site.  They provide harm reduction information, treatment, counselling, rehydration, nutrition and complementary therapies.  Their grant will help them build their administrative capacity to extend their service to the many events now expressing an interest – the money will pay for a laptop, printer, phones, internet keys and some design/website support.

The Graffiti Art Project will bring young people living in hostel accommodation together to build their skills through painting, drawing and web design around the theme of graffiti art.  Their grant will pay for canvases, paint aerosols, felt-tip pens and other art materials, and a digital camera and laptop computer so that they can photograph their artwork and create their own web pages to display it.

This group is working with Hackney Regeneration Team to identify empty flats on estates undergoing regeneration which could be occupied short-term rather than being boarded up.  They aim to pilot a model that can be adopted by other local authorities.  The grant funding will get them started by paying for their registration with the Financial Services Authority as a housing co-op, and for electrical safety checks for their first two flats.

Anya’s Travelling Apothecary project will provide healing, advice and workshops on how to make natural remedies and cosmetics for travellers and their animals, on a voluntary donation basis.  Her grant will pay for a supply of organic tinctures, essential oils, carrier oils, beeswax, cocoa butter, witch hazel, bottles, a mortar and pestle, mixing bowls, sieves, filters, funnels, shelving materials, paints for signage and reference materials.

Fraz is an activist involved in a large communal squat supporting several asylum seekers and refugees.  The grant will pay for a multilingual library and infopoint to help the squatters communicate with each other and to share information on squatting, migration, and local services and resources.  The funding will buy English-foreign language dictionaries in Arabic, Tigrinya, Somali, Amharic, Burmese, Farsi, Kurdish, Pashtu, Italian, Swahili and French, plus information leaflets, maps and multiple copies of self-help guides about squatters’ rights and combating detention and deportation for asylum seekers.

This group plans to make films to show homelessness from the under-represented perspective of the homeless people themselves, to challenge people’s preconceptions about homeless people and to start discussions about the rough sleeping scene.  The grant will pay for all the costs of making and launching their first film.