Walking Home
Hastings Rental Health report on their latest fundraising effort
In the last issue of HIP, Hastings Rental Health Housing Co-op member Jess Luby wrote of our appeal for support before we launched our crowdfunder and loan requests to help us buy Gensing Manor and bring it into community ownership.
Our crowdfunder will be officially launched with an action by Sarah Gomes Harris, who is once again donning her purple Rental Health house to do a fundraising event. There will also be the opportunity to meet with lots of other co-operatives, discussing different approaches to setting them up. The advice will be invaluable. Sarah explains:
“The plan is to walk from one housing co-op to another every day for one month, which will take me around the UK, or as far as I can manage in one month!
“What’s needed are lots of small donations rather than fewer big ones, so that we don’t have to hoop-jump or engage in excessive tick-boxing or compromise to make up obscene returns. We have to make these homes affordable homes. And they have to be affordable for everyone.
“Fundraising for a property this size and cost is a big undertaking, so we need to match the scale of need with a much greater level of awareness-raising. You might think we should aim lower, or cheaper, but at this point it really makes no difference. All property and land is expensive and hard to come by in this climate, so we may as well aim for something that fits our needs as a community of organisers, a place that will allow us to offer more to those in need, as well as space to work, hire out and grow food.”
Sarah will begin her walk by heading west. Her first co-operative stop will be the St Leonards-based Walden Pond, then off to Lewes, Brighton, Southsea, Southampton, Salisbury, Frome, Bath, Bristol, Newport, Stroud and up to Birmingham, with a short stop off at the Radical Routes gathering in the Peak District, where co-ops meet every few months to network, skill share and run workshops.
“Hopefully there will still be enough public footpaths,” she says. “Inevitably, walking between these co-ops dressed as a house won’t just be about the fundraising. I imagine some routes will be treacherous and much of the land privately owned and inaccessible. It will highlight just how much land has been taken from the citizens of this country due to inheritance or arbitrary land-grabbing centuries ago; land that could be used for people struggling to find somewhere affordable to live and at the mercy of opportunistic landlords and so-called ‘developers’.”
She will then head a bit further north before coming back down the east side of the UK. This will set a target of walking between 6-10 hours per day, depending on the distance between co-ops. It’s definitely ambitious, and will require a lot of stamina and cooperation from her smart phone sat nav.
Taking this time off unpaid is not an option for Sarah – like many of us, she needs to cover her rent, bills and food, so she will be storyboarding in the evenings for an animation she is producing in collaboration with a PhD student. Their project is about democratising access to academia – the type of work that is key to help create a functioning and fair society with the space and time for inquisition, curiosity and creativity. The type of work she is only able to do while her rent is affordable.
“Imagine if everyone could afford their accommodation. We would all be contributing in satisfying and useful ways to our society and really cultivating the type of world we want to live in.
“We need to get away from this treadmill mentality. This is the only thing that trickles down from the top. Aspiration to highly-paid jobs, working mad hours, buying a home you can barely afford, exhausting yourself to keep on top of that, buying another home to rent out so you can cut yourself some slack and retire early while living off the profit of another person’s grind and sweat, putting someone else on that treadmill to pay for your relaxation. It’s an unsustainable system. Let’s all live affordably and comfortably. This is possible with organisation and collective investment.”
As she can do her work anywhere, Sarah was the best person to take on the fundraiser (plus she is already familiar with her mobile house!). The rest of the co-op will be busy behind their screens working on a business plan, connecting with potential collaborators and supporters, and HBC, who are looking into the viability of supporting us.
If you’d like to sign up to support the crowdfunder so that you can help us get off to a good start the moment it goes live, you can do so here. We need to hit the ground running, so there is enough momentum to hit the target we need. Just use the following link (the last print issue had an error, this is the correct link!) bit.ly/HRHCCrowdfund
Look out for Hastings Rental Health Co-op’s purple house as they set off from Gensing Manor at 9am Monday 7 August, and on their return 3 September for a little gathering and perhaps a little nap in Gensing Gardens.
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