While Brisbane residents sleep in their homes, a team of volunteers transforms an empty carpark into a space that provides homeless people with much more than just a bed. Beddown, a non-profit organization, is using urban spaces that are busy in the day and empty at night, turning them into pop-up emergency accommodation for homeless people.
Norman McGillivray, creator of the initiative, is personally impacted by homelessness because his father was homeless. When McGillivray was only two-years-old, his father suffered a stroke that left him with impaired speech and partial paralysis. His father’s life quickly fell apart. He lost his carpenter job, and his wife left him; eventually, he ended up homeless on the streets of London. Less than ten years later, aged 42, he suffered a heart attack that killed him. “My father died lonely and homeless. I was 11 and helpless,” said McGillivray.
In Australia, roughly 8000 homeless people are sleeping on the streets every night. The average life expectancy of homeless people in Australia is 47. “There are hundreds of homeless people losing their lives every year to suicide, diseases, pneumonia,” McGillivray explained.
McGillivray believes that getting people off the streets and back on track starts with a decent night’s sleep. He began looking into Australia’s homeless issue and knew that he was destined to do something that would make a difference.
One night when McGillivray parked in a local shopping center car park, he noticed the enormous empty space. Car parks are bustling in the daytime, but at night they’re entirely vacant. Also, the car parks are usually located in the center of the cities, where homelessness thrives. The lightbulb moment came to McGillivray as he saw the potential in utilizing the space differently, and that’s when he thought of “Beddown.”
Beddown, which started with a 14-night pilot program, is running in Brisbane at a Secure Parking car park in the CBD. The pop-up accommodation provides inflatable mattresses with doonas and pillows. However, the space doesn’t only have beds for the homeless but also free food, laundry service, showers, doctors, dentists, chaplaincy, hairdressers, and counseling.
Beddown website wrote:
Sleep deprivation is a massive issue, but this is about more than providing a safe place to sleep, it’s about helping people change and helping to save people’s lives. Over time, [for people experiencing homelessness] there goes confidence, dignity, and self-respect. We can start to restore all those layers.
McGillivray partnered with Peter Anson, the CEO of Secure Parking, which is Australia’s largest carpark operator. Secure Parking operates over 600 car parks across Australia and New Zealand, which means Beddown will have access to all of them. The initiative could potentially result in a massive difference in the homeless population across the nation. If the pilot program proves successful, then Beddown plans to roll it out to some of these other locations.
Anson said:
Big companies get approached by lots of non-profits, but this really resonated with me. I’ve been privileged enough to travel overseas, and you see [homelessness] in all major capital cities, and it’s growing.
Thankfully, many organizations have joined the initiative, including The Salvation Army, Hair Aid, The Good Box, Grill’d, Orange Sky Laundry, SNP Security, Rosies, and Sunny Street.
McGillivray believes that the only way a homeless person can get an education, training, employment, rehabilitation, and affordable housing is if they have a support network. The charity’s long-term goal is to provide that network of support to the homeless in hopes of changing their lives for the better.
For more information, or if you’re interested in making a donation, check out their website.
