End of year musings and gratitude 🙏 🙌🏻

Welcome to my end of year musings:

Looking back, I am incredibly proud of the last 12 months we have had at Beddown , some of the highlights for me are outlined below with my sincere gratitude to many.

The Beddown Breakfast Club:

We started a humble breakfast service in March that offered a safe, non judgemental space for our guests to come for a chat, get access to case management, services and assistance in a warm, welcoming and friendly environment. The main aim for me was how do we bring the best possible start to the day we can for our guests and create a space where they are seen, they are heard and they are helped all with serving them with hot food and beverages for breakfast.

What started with 7 guests initially has scaled to the high 20’s, with the most guests hosted to date being 33.

Thank you to our amazing collaborators BUSY Ability , ADA Link, The Salvation Army Australia and Drug ARM

Also our awesome case managers, initially with Danielle Lawlor and now Benjamin Zambra who have helped approximately 17 people into accommodation pathways and the amazing inCommunity Connect assertive outreach team Brett Briggs and Luke Montgomery for being absolute legends engaging with those who are sleeping rough in Ipswich CBD and surrounding suburbs.

Without our volunteers we couldn’t do what we do without you, my sincere thanks to Andrew, Dorothy, Karen, Tana, Sarah and our finance manager Juan for helping us open and run this service three times per week for our guests.

So proud of what we have achieved with a humble breakfast service.

Female Venue:

We started to look at the back area of inCommunity ’s HQ as our first female venue, the very tragic looking “cage” that was once part of an old restaurant that could be taken and transformed to save and change the lives of guests.

With the amazing help and support of incredible people and organisations such as Wolter Consulting Group , BSPN Architecture , Ipswich City Council and Cr Andrew Fechner - we managed to lodge the planning application and get it approved within 5 weeks, anyone who works in this area knows this is record time!

My thanks to Natalie Rayment , Louise Macpherson , Cara Phillips , Helena Blankestyn , Rod Barr and Cr Andrew Fechner for all their amazing support in bringing the venue this far.

You can see what we hope and envision the venue will look like here:

Public Speaking:

I have had the opportunity to speak at a number of events this year to both raise awareness of homelessness and the story of why Beddown exists and what we are trying to do, a few that stand out to me are:

1. SomethingQ
2. AMAQ Foundation Charity Gala night
3. LinkedIn Local Brisbane CBD event recently
4. Ipswich Cycling Club event

Thank you to everyone and organisation that invited me along to talk about what we do.

Fundraising:

Fundraising has been incredibly challenging this year, especially given the pressures on many individuals and businesses, also it doesn't help that I am not and do not confess to being a professional fundraiser, but I have tried my best to come up with some fresh and unique approaches, but nonetheless the year has had a number of amazing highlights.

In the midst of Australia’s worst housing and homelessness crisis we launched The Change 47 campaign in May with our most ambitious target to date to look to try and help more Queenslanders access safety, shelter, security, services and sleep - the target was to try and raise $4.7m to help fund 6 sites across the state and look to help more of our people.

Whilst we fell far short of the target it did at the time bring us our largest ever donation from the The BUSY Group - thanks to Stacey Turnbull and Paul Miles who were both so instrumental in making this happen and the rest of the team we received $94k towards our Ipswich venue. Absolutely awesome, I love these guys they are so invested in what we do and also support a number of other great organisations.

My sincere thanks to all the individuals who utilised the Change 47 platform for their own fundraisers, such as Simon Clarke , Laura Litcanu and others that got behind us.

Also without the help and support from Karen Furnivall and all her hard work on making this campaign come to life for us.

Magnus Health selected Beddown as one of three organisations to be the recipient of their first ever Magnus Ball, thank you to Shelley Jacks and the MH team for allowing us to be part of such an incredible event and it was the first time I had ever got to wear a Tuxedo!

Not everyone’s Christmas will be Happy - I had the idea for a hard hitting video that would seem to start with the magic of christmas and turn tragic pretty quickly to highlight the plight of many this christmas, my vision for this was brought to life by our amazing friends Caroline Sparrow for her emotional acting range and Sierra Sweeny for her skills at capturing and editing all the footage - thank you.

A big thanks also to Celeste F. for creating all the amazing marketing collateral and platform to accompany the campaign.

To all the awesome organisations that have got behind to share the campaign to get as many eyeballs across it as possible BSPN Architecture , Just Digital People , i2C Architects , The BUSY Group and our great friend Erin Edwards Channel 10.

Haven't seen the video yet? You can see the video here and support if you wish here

More recently and after working closely with the AMA Queensland Foundation for the past few years. This year the Foundation decided to get behind and support Beddown and we were recently the recipient of a donation of $173k! Our largest ever, Incredible! a massive thanks goes to Dr. Brett Dale , Dilip Dhupelia and the amazing team at the foundation.

Other honourable fundraising mentions - PIP Theatre for their 12 hour slumber party which included a Canvases for Comfort exhibition with pieces donated by our great friend and amazing artist Keith Blake , Student One for  their movie night fundraiser and Jane McDonald MA CA GAICD & MindFx Limited for organising a Sunshine Coast Change 47 event for us.

Our Ugly Christmas Tree Shirts have proved popular again this year with this years design created by Colin Eyre - thank you to Colin and to everyone who supported us and purchased one or more of the tree-shirts 🎄🎄 

Accolades:

I am driven by purpose and do not intentionally look to seek out accolades and its not why I do what I do, however I was extremely humbled and honoured to be named as one of 50 most inspirational men in SEQ for 2023 by The Courier-Mail and also recently found out that I was nominated for the Australian of the Year 2024, thank you to everyone who was involved in both of those and think I am worthy of such, I can't help feel like somewhat of an imposter with so many amazing humans doing incredible things out there.

Final thoughts:

I can't complain about how 2023 has been, it has been awesome, but the issue of homelessness has grown exponentially, with no homes coming anytime soon, I constantly think of all the empty spaces that could do so much good, the quarantine centres that have not been used, the disaster management protocols we have to activate evacuation centres on the turn of dime for natural disasters. So many of our people can be helped, maybe now we have a new premier in Qld he will be open to different approaches - I can but hope and I will continue to advocate for our people.

Finally, I want to take a moment to thank you all for your support, kind words, messages and encouragement throughout the year, it means a lot to me, I will continue into 2024 driven by purpose.

Wishing you all and your families a safe, merry and amazing festive season that is both relaxing and rejuvenating to head into a fresh and prosperous 2024 🎄🎅🏻🍀

Take care

Norm ❤️