Soroptimist International South West Pacific

SI Mackay partnrned with Better Together Housing team, to create a series of videos, these videos cover conversations where a range of initiatives and questions were answered around the housing crisis for older women in Mackay.   

The report by SI Mackay

International Women’s Day event 2023

SI Mackay is always keen to identify local needs in our community, and we often invite guests to our business meeting so we can hear about issues from a different perspective.

Lauren from Better Together Housing was one of our speakers at a meeting last year, and raised our awareness of the growing need for older women specific to homelessness. She gave us some statistics and facts on the growing rate of homelessness, and the cost of housing shortages, especially for women over 55, and how the issue is impacting local women.

We discussed the lack of knowledge about this rising problem for older women, both in our club and among our members, and explored with Lauren, just how to get this information circulated within the community. The purpose of raising awareness was two-fold, firstly to reach out to women where they were at risk of homelessness, but secondly, engaging with women who had additional space in their home due to changes in their circumstances.

We felt that a series of short videos, could be the best format and that our members were ideal candidates to ask a series of questions in order to extract information from Lauren.  And so our next project was borne – to create a short video series that would launch on International Women’s Day, but then be used by both the Better Together Housing team, and SI Mackay as a tool for advocacy and activism. It was a great joint initiative where we explored a range of questions to be answered, and with the support of Central Queensland University, used their library space to film the series. 

6 videos are on our website for you to view -  https://www.facebook.com/simackaynq and use the search function to find the ‘BTH videos’.