Pushing Back the Walls

Sometimes you need to push the walls around you back a little. How close all the hassles and pressures can feel – and how much space is necessary to just breathe and think about what the hell is possible again.

The impact of poverty and inequality on people’s emotions and psychology is not discussed often enough. Statistics for homelessness, unemployment and financial struggle failing to sum up the less-easily measured pressures on their humanity and sense of self day-to-day.

At Addi Road we see how an individual’s mental health is a matter of community well-being too. You can’t be a strong, happy and productive individual if everyone around you is battling too. Let alone when so many are hiding their struggle out of embarrassment or even shame, a force of disconnection all its own.

As a community organisation, Addi Road does not just help people at the edge – we involve ourselves with supporting plenty who may be sliding in the same frightening direction. The fact that we now have 1,500 transaction a week through our two food pantries in Marrickville and Camperdown tells a very direct story about the levels of need. But it does not articulate a more elusive and anecdotal picture we have seen forming over the last few years: that of middle-class fragmentation as much as working class and underclass struggle. Rising rents and mortgages, casualised income, cost-of-living increases at every turn…. it’s wearing people down. Some days it is vivid how bone tired people really are.

Each week, though, some small cause for optimism at our Wednesday Night Lights event. We see individuals and families from all kinds of backgrounds attending. On the night we offer a free and nutritious sit-down hot meal with a wagon-train of wraparound services close by. Along with a fine meal in a friendly atmosphere we provide free medical help, free legal advice and a free mobile laundry among other things. These offerings are the beautiful result of our partnerships with Street Side Medics, Marrickville Legal Centre and Orange Sky Australia among a shifting retinue of other organisations we work with each week.

We see how many people come along for communal warmth, a bit of conversation, a feeling of belonging, a stop-gap in lonely times. The food is great, the services appreciated and necessary, but the rewards in people’s demeanour and confidence means as much to us. The sustenance is about more than the good food or the services. It’s about the human connection and being valued – even the simple act of one person helping another across a table just by being there, talking and sharing who they are and what is happening in their lives. We bring them and everything together, yes. But they do something special for each other too.

It’s a community spirit we carry through all the programs that we do. Addi Moves similarly offers people a chance to access a community gym for free – with accredited exercise physiologists guiding them. Created in partnership with UNSW, there’s an on-site gym here at the community centre for those who cannot otherwise afford such access and help. The ideal being to give people a healthier life physically, and a means for well-being that goes much deeper: free, culturally responsive, and trauma-informed physical activity supporting individuals who need it most.

Ou Addi Sounds program works in a similar way. It’s a new on-site studio, developed in partnership with ANU. It encourages voices, many of them young (but not exclusively so), who want to learn how to advance their music, songwriting, singing, podcasting and technical skills. Again all provided for free – for people who might otherwise not afford it or even imagine their voices can be so recognised and travel so much further. Individuls speaking and singing for themselves and the communities they are from.

This is just a little of what we do. But at its core – across food relief, arts and culture, and all our programs – is something more unifying and true: people need to be recognised and valued, supported and encouraged. They need to know the walls limiting and even crushing them can be pushed back – and that they have some strength in doing this. Finding both a respite and a step up, and even some added warmth and inspiration in what Addi Road can provide.