Small Shift believes everyone has the right to belong. We exist to support people to build a sense of belonging to their local places and community.
What is the Small Shift model?
Small Shift is a social enterprise that trains and inspires communities to create beautiful, meaningful and unique public spaces in their neighbourhood. We use DIO (Do-It-Ourselves) projects as a vehicle to build community resilience, social trust and employment pathways.
1. Soft entry to employment: Small Shift hires people who face tough challenges getting jobs for various reasons including mental illness, injury, disability, trauma, social capital, digital illiteracy and lack of formal education. Small Shift’s crew are upskilled, mentored, paid and supported to lead.
2. Neighbours working together: locals of different backgrounds and abilities volunteer to deliver a DIO project together, and build a strong social network in their neighbourhood.
What has Small Shift achieved already?
The Small Shift model is built on a pilot project completed last year at Rough Edges, a cafe for people experiencing homelessness and isolation in Darlinghurst, supported by the City of Sydney. Through a series of workshops, 30+ street community members and local volunteers came together to come up with ideas for improving the cafe's street frontage. People took small shifts to deliver those ideas, which in the end included greenery, a story board, a book share, seating and mural painting.
We were particularly inspired by this one man, Stephen, who essentially became our lead mural painter. Diagnosed with a mental illness, he has been a beneficiary of various services. He is an incredible artist as you can see from the photos and videos of the mural painting he led -- he really wants to work and share his talent. In the beginning he was a bit apprehensive about how this community project would work out given the large number of people, but throughout the process, we saw him step up and manage this large public artwork and train other people.
We are very proud of how the project turned out, but the bigger impact was felt when passers-by would stop to look, take photos and chat with the community. The DIO project was a relationship builder between people, and it changed people’s perception of and behaviours around the place.
Small Shift is set up to hire and support people like Stephen to lead change with the local community.
What’s the impact of creating citizen-led, inclusive cities? How are urban developments responding to or neglecting our very human traits — think loneliness, empathy and self-determination and many others. This documentary explores urban inequity that we face today, global practices that we can learn from and the purpose of our work.
Who’s involved in Small Shift?
Small Shift is led by architect turned placemaker turned social entrepreneur Julia Suh, supported by our passionate crew, volunteers and advisors. Julia was one of 10 Australians awarded Westpac Social Change Fellowship in 2017, which focused on learning from different social enterprise models across 15 cities and led to developing Small Shift to fill Australia's employment pathway gaps.
Small Shift is supported by Westpac Bicentennial Foundation, Australian Social Value Bank, MinterEllison, and various community housing, social service and vocational training providers.
At Vivid Ideas, here’s Julia Suh laying out why we need a new kind of city-making narrative — one that includes people on the margin.
Why are we doing this?
Because everyone has the right to belong. To a home. To a workplace. To a community.
A sense of belonging and social trust is fundamental to wellbeing, but Australians are spending more time alone. 24% of all households in 2016 were one-person households. Other groups who experience social isolation include: single parents living with dependent children, people with limited English, older people and people living with disabilities. Loneliness has detrimental impacts on our wellbeing (equal to smoking 15 cigarettes a day according to the Vivek Murthy, a former surgeon-general of the United States) but we don’t talk about it enough or actively do something about it.
Meaningful work – whether paid or volunteer – is also central to people's well being. Being deprived of economic participation has not only financial but also lasting psychological impact. Long-term unemployed people are more likely to have mental, behavioural and physical health issues. Currently there are too many applicants for available jobs; and the lack confidence, skills, transportation, digital iteracy and social capital are also barriers to getting jobs.
Because your postcode shouldn't determine your future.
Not every suburb is the same. Some offer better playgrounds than others, better bus shelters than others, and better streets than others. Yet people in disadvantaged areas are often left out of having a say in shaping our cities and the opportunities they present, because they lack confidence, don't have time and resources or feel their voices don't matter. We need a systemic change in city-making, one place at a time, driven by communities. People have the innate ability to better their lives -- they just need the resources and leverage for change.
Because there are too many underutilised places.
Around the world, including Parramatta, we see too many places -- parks, streets and plazas -- that could be more meaningful to and more loved by the locals. Unloved places get built because the community doesn't get involved in a meaningful way in the design development process.
We need your help to take this DIO movement to disadvantaged areas in the City of Parramatta.
We have been working with the City of Parramatta Council to identify a project site that could benefit from this project the most.
So far, a suburb called Telopea has been on the top of our list.
We have spoken with the local organisations that know the strengths and challenges in the neighbourhood. It is a diverse community with lots of energy: You see young people exercising hard in the park; older couples sitting on the bench having lunch in the sun; and skateboarders skillfully dropping into the bowl.
It also has a set of challenges.
48% of Telopea's residents were born overseas but have little opportunity to get to know their neighbours, 42% earn a low income (less than $500 weekly gross income), and 23% live in social housing*. While statistics show some crime rates are higher than the NSW average** -- for example, criminal intent, incidents of assault and some types of theft -- the perception of the neighbourhood seems to transcend the actual stats. There is a stigma attached to Telopea.
We believe our DIO project can help restore community pride, create employment pathways and build relationships between neighbours in disadvantaged areas. We have a few project site options and we will confirm the final project site with the Council once we have secured this funding. We have support from Hume Housing and Evolve Housing, the local Community Housing Providers, who will help encourage their social housing tenants to get involved as volunteers and causal employees for Small Shift. We have the local YMCA's support so that we can connect with young people keen to have more influence on the environments they live in. We have large companies supporting us with in-kind contributions.
We have all the support we need, except funding.
Potential project site in Telopea
What are we going to do at the project site?
Well, we can't tell you exactly because the ideas don't come from us. They come from the local community. This funding will support us to run an ideation workshop with the community so that we have a set of improvement ideas that are important to them. They could include a mural painting, a book share, planters, play areas for kids...we will have to wait and see! BUT what we CAN tell you is that the place will change for the better, and it will be beautiful, unique and most of all, meaningful to the local community.
How will this campaign change the future of Small Shift?
Crowdfunding is not how we normally fund our projects – but this campaign is significant at this early stage of business. This is THE ONE project that will really demonstrate to communities, policy makers, governments, property groups and developers in Sydney and worldwide, that PEOPLE want more citizen-led, beautiful, unique and meaningful places. It's as much about the number of supporters as the amount of funding. The success of this campaign will enable us to validate the Small Shift model's impact, and take it to the rest of the Greater Sydney Area, Australia and the rest of the world.
Want to join the movement?
Donate to this campaign and share with your network.
Participate (see Rewards) if you are in and around Parramatta.
Subscribe to our news and invitations. We don’t spam.
Join our Facebook group and initiate your own projects – we are here to help.
Check out our different Rewards.
We would like to give our supporters experiences and things that are meaningful. They include our 'Hey Neighbour!' postcards that you can drop into your neighbours' or friends' mailboxes. (Yes, why don't you invite them over to yours for some tea!)
Hey Neighbour! postcard - Front
Hey Neighbour! postcard - Back
We are very excited to have the support of the incredibly talented Joseph Kwaku Sarkodie of Sarkodie Photography and have his professional photographs as part of our Rewards. He will take photographs of this DIO movement you helped create. Check out some of his works below.
* 2016 census data
** NSW Crime Tool Jul 2016 - Jun 2018
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