Families of Hope

A recent study asked Australians: ‘What makes a family?’ Love (95%) and unconditional, non-judgmental support (92%) were rated the most important characteristics when defining a family; legal ties and blood/genetics were rated as least important.

Bekk Shaw, Hopestreet Program Founder and Director, has seen countless variations of ‘family’ at the Families of Hope project at Davoren Park.

“We’ve had people tell us that the Families of Hope group is a lifeline, that it is their other ‘family’,” Bekk explains. “We’ve seen many examples of the families gathering around each other to provide support, even when they don’t have much themselves.”

Hopestreet began as a grassroots youth group that now operates under local non-profit Careworks, offering engagement, outreach and mentoring for young people facing challenges in their life. The group opened a pop-up op shop to help fund its youth work and many of the local parents became involved as volunteers.

“More and more parents started to come, and they would hang out when the op shop was open, and we added a little café and it soon became a community space,” Bekk explains.

“The parents started saying, ‘We see what the young people get in their drop-in sessions, we think we need it for ourselves’, because as one parent put it, ‘we need to be families of hope for our kids’.”

Small dollars, big impact

A $5,000 Neighbourhood Grant from Foundation SA enabled Families of Hope to run 40 weekly drop-in sessions for parents and their children at the Hopestreet Op Shop / Café shopfront in Davoren Park. People could sit and chat over morning tea and participate in a range of activities including art and craft, cooking classes, self-care workshops or excursions to the local library, food co-op and more.

Thirty-five families took part, with an average of 17 people attending each session.

The project was so successful that it is now entirely run by the parents.

“It just became a beautiful byproduct that’s now its own thing in its own right,” Bekk explains. “Last year the parents said, ‘It’s not just a café and op shop, to us it’s a community hub’ and now they train young people in the café and op shop and have started developing new initiatives such as a community pantry.

“Anyone can walk in when they need someone to talk to and the fact that a lot of the parents have been through tough times themselves and maybe didn’t have great connections within their own family an now we hear them say, ‘This is my family, this is my safe space’.

“People have become very connected to the space and it’s been a lifesaver, I think, for many people.”

The power of community-led change

“One of the parents went out to check on her and brought her in and the lady told her story and the parents said, ‘Okay, we’ll try and get you a social worker’ and they fed her, they gave her clothes from the op shop. This group of women just gathered round her and took care of her because they had their own lived experience of staying in hotels and being homeless. They knew exactly how to help her. It was such a powerful, collective response that’s really stayed with me. And they all just keep an eye out for each other, like a little network. It’s been incredible.”

Community-led initiatives like Families of Hope are creating positive outcomes in large and small ways for communities across South Australia. Often, it’s the people and communities who’ve experienced issues and challenges firsthand that know what is needed to change them.

“We’ve already seen some great things come out of Families of Hope,” Bekk says. “One of the single mums who had had a hard time with things like house maintenance started a peer support group for other single mums.

“We also had an older gentlemen who is a grandparent, who decided he wanted to support people who felt lonely, so he’s helped set up a Chatty Café for anyone to be able to come and talk.”

Community events are now a regular fixture at the Hopestreet Community Hub, run by the parents’ events committee. The space has hosted Book Week events and even a Christmas gathering with free photos with Santa.

“These are some of the most inspiring and powerful people I’ve ever met,” Bekk says. “They’ve lived through so much and they’re so resilient and they’re still willing to give back because they know how hard life can be and it doesn’t take a lot of money to make a difference.”

Learn more about Hopestreet here.

Images courtesy of Hopestreet.