Unashamedly Beautiful Housing for Melbourne’s Elderly Homeless

In August, Wintringham, a not-for-profit welfare company in Melbourne, Australia, celebrated its tenth year of providing the elderly homeless with affordable housing and high quality care services. Founder and Chief Executive Officer Bryan Lipmann was awarded the Order of Australia this year for his work.

“We were appalled that the elderly homeless didn’t have access to mainstream aged-care service; we felt they should be entitled to the same services the rest of Australians take for granted,” said Bryan.

In 1997 Wintringham won a United Nations World Habitat Award for their “excellent innovative housing”: the Port Melbourne hostel, and the other seven Wintringham facilities, were designed by Melbourne architect Allen Kong, who uses feng-shui in his.

“We’ve got eight facilities, about 300 beds, and a staff of 120,” says Bryan. “The environments we build are beautiful, unashamedly beautiful. People respond to their environments in ways we’re only beginning to understand – they respond to a calm and dignified environment.”

After years of living in the bush, Bryan began working with the homeless in 1989, at a night shelter in Melbourne called Gordon House.

He talked to Mandala in August.

How many homeless people are there in Australia? How many in Melbourne?

It is always very difficult to estimate the number of homeless in any city or country. It so much depends on how you define a homeless person (are they roofless or is it just that they are living in appalling circumstances without the supports that we would ordinarily associate with home?). The Council to Homeless Persons in Victoria estimated in 1997/98 that there were 166,000 homeless persons in Australia (population 18.7 million), and in Melbourne (population 3.2 million) there are said to be some 30,000 homeless. But these figures only count those people using homeless persons services and not those who are outside the system. You could probably add a third or a half again to get total figures.

How many actually live on the street?

Same problem in answering this question. The real question is not how many there are on the streets but how many are living terrible lives in frightening circumstances unable to access the kinds of aged-care support that the rest of the community takes for granted. Almost everyone living in marginal conditions such as poor housing, lack of income, disabilities, lack of social supports, etc. are vulnerable to becoming homeless. The unfortunate fact is that for many aged people who become homeless, the journey is often a permanent one. Very few elderly homeless people can escape the cycle of poverty and desperation that is associated with life on the streets.

How did you get involved with homeless people?

During my last few years in the bush, we owned a small farm. We had to do outside work to make it pay. This was in Queensland, in the northeast of the country. While some of that work was working on other farms, I also got a job working with unemployed youth in the local township. Increasingly I found more interest in that than the farm work. I would get up in the morning, do some farming, go home and change, go into the town to work with the kids for a while, then go back home and start farming.

I found that while I was alone I started thinking about these kids more than the farming, and in the end we dedicated to give up farming to go back to the city. The bloke who employed me told me I should try to get some training. It’s obviously difficult to go back to the city in your mid-30s when you’ve only got farming skills – not much demand for economists who’ve never practiced. I actually did re-train for two years, and we had to live off the money my wife and I’d accumulated working in the bush. It wasn’t much to go on. My wife had returned to painting; she’s an artist. That’s another reason we returned to the city – so she could re-establish her painting career.

One of the placements I had while I was re-training was at Gordon House, and I loved it – I just loved it. I was offered work there straight away.

What is Gordon House?

Gordon House is gone now, but it was a night shelter. It’s where homeless people come to sleep for the night. This was a little different than most of them. It was one of the largest ones in Melbourne at the time. I just loved working there and felt for the first time that I’d found something I liked so much I would try and stick with it.

There were three large night shelters in Melbourne up until a few years ago. They have largely been redeveloped or pulled down and replaced with more targeted services that address the individual needs of people on a “case management system” rather than just give someone a roof over their heads for a few days. In most other cities in Australia and overseas (particularly the US) the large night shelters still exist – some of which temporarily house many hundreds every night.

Did you find this more inspiring than working with young people?

There were young people there too – all ages, really. Gordon House was all ages and all sexes, which is quite unusual for night shelters. Usually night shelters are single-sex. There were couple-month old babies there all the way to people in their 90s. Like all night shelters it was very violent – people were being raped and murdered.

There were also terrific acts of kindness there, and a real feeling of community. It was a tough community, and in a lot of ways, a degrading community, but there was a real sense of vitality and life there, which I thrived on. I also had some really good colleagues, whom I enjoyed working with, some of whom I’ve remained in touch with for 20 years now.

Where did the vitality and life come from?

People living on the edge. Somebody once told me that life in a night shelter alternates between numbing boredom and white terror. There will be absolutely nothing happening, you’re just sitting around. You won’t even be reading, just sitting there and staring into space, then all of a sudden this dramatic incident will happen – a fight or an eviction or a screaming match where a person has been de-institutionalized from a psychiatric ward and is going on a rampage and being caught up in a maelstrom.

I think the people involved in this work are all pretty passionate about social justice issues, about working long hours and being stressed. I suppose the types of people who were there impacted on it. They were very on the edge – some of the people were very scared, very angry, some of them had psychiatric disabilities, physical disabilities, and all of them were in grinding poverty. As much as some of them wished they were living in a middle-class environment, they weren’t, and I suppose the types of experiences they were facing were totally different than the rest of the community can even understand.

How were you inspired to start Wintringham?

It’s a good story, really. When I got to Gordon House it was a ten-story night shelter, a concrete building with 300 people living in it. There were two other night shelters, one run by St. Vincent de Paul and one run by the Salvation Army. The government at the time decided that these were inhumane ways of treating and looking after homeless people, that there’s got to be a better way.

They encouraged the agencies who were running these night shelters to close them down and open smaller and targeted services. They put a lot of money into doing this, and there was a lot of resistance to it at the time.

I was made the redevelopment manager of Gordon House after only being there six months or a year. My job was to develop new services that would meet the needs of the residents.

What we did was we tried to look at who made up the population of Gordon House: the vast majority of them were semi-permanent, which was not the intention of the night shelter. There was a huge turnover with the beds that were vacant during the night.

We tried to get groupings of people together, sit with them and see what would be good services to provide. We had a women’s service, a youth service, a crisis service, a family service. We were receiving a huge number of families who were arriving after going through some bout of domestic violence; women would arrive with their faces punched in and children screaming, and then they would be stored in a place where the population was about 80% male – not the perfect environment for women.

We could set up family homes where they wouldn’t even have to come to Gordon House, but they could go straight to these family centers, which were run by social workers. The kids would get back to school and the mothers would get their lives back together. This was happening in the other shelters as well.

The one thing that was causing the most amount of grief and was the biggest problem to solve was the elderly and frail living at Gordon House. We reckon there were a hundred people living in these shelters who were elderly and frail. We weren’t able to get them into the mainstream aged-care services, which were all Christian-run. This is exactly what happens in the States and England, and other places. It’s almost impossible to get homeless people into mainstream aged-care services.

It used to really get my goat to see these church-based agencies talking about social justice, and the same organizations would run night shelters, but they wouldn’t let their guys into them. If they did build places for the elderly homeless they were really shocking places.

This was the real challenge: how to get the elderly homeless into the shelters and off the streets. There was nowhere to put them because if you closed down Gordon House there was nowhere to go. We tried to get them into mainstream services, but we didn’t make one successful placement in years.

The idea came about to build one of our own. The company I was working for at the time was not receptive to that idea, but funnily enough, the federal government, the aged-care minister at the time, was very supportive. He said we should try and get ourselves a partner of some sort because they didn’t believe the night shelter I worked for had the experience to run an aged-person service.

We went around to a few other services and eventually found an Anglican service called the Brotherhood of St. Lawrence. They had a director there who loved the idea, and we formed a small joint party to get this company off the ground, and I was made the worker for that company. It didn’t really work, mainly because the dynamics of two welfare agencies working together just didn’t work smoothly. We eventually decided that we would just form a brand new company. We just had to get a name for it.

The name I picked was Wintringham, after a guy called Tiny Wintringham. There was a large building in the heart of the city called Gordon Place – not Gordon House but Gordon Place – and it was run for profit by some entrepreneurs. Eventually the fire brigade said they needed to get the building up to fire standards, and the owners decided that it wasn’t economic to do that, so they decided to close it.

Tiny Wintringham was a resident there, and he tried to get the residents to rally together and buy the building, which, of course, was totally impossible. He went to the local builders [and] laborers union and they were appalled. They put a black ban on the building so no one would pull it down. While that was going on Tiny went to the government and went to the media to try to organize people to solve the problem in one way or another. A welfare organization heard about it and went to the government and said, “If you build us a new place, we’ll run it.”

The government, believe it or not, in those days, 1978, agreed. They built Gordon House on the banks of the Yarra River, which runs right through the heart of Melbourne, right on the edge of the city, where I subsequently worked. Tiny died. When it came around to getting a name for this new company, the idea of this one homeless guy standing up to these incredible powers – state government, media, unions, owners of the building. The image of powerlessness and someone saying, “I’m not powerless, I’m going to do something to change it,” I found absolutely inspirational. In a way I’m glad I never met him and don’t know how much of the story is true, and it doesn’t really matter. I used to have pictures of him in my office even though I didn’t know much about it; I learned more later on.

When they asked about forming a new name, I gave a short version of what I just mentioned and said, “Let’s call it Wintringham.” It wasn’t planned – it just came out, and everyone grinned and said it sounds great. I think Tiny would be well-pleased to look back on it because we’ve tried to do exactly what he said, which is to provide non-judgmental, non-church-based services that allow people to live in dignity. Of course, it’s now very different from those early days, but the values and the principles that motivated us in those very first days are unchanged.

What year was this?

I started working at Gordon House in 1985, and we began the re-development work in 1986. I really started working on the aged-care service in ’87, and it became a legal, public company in 1989. In literally a few days’ time we’re going to have our ten-year anniversary. It’s nice symmetry that we’re talking about it almost 10 years to the day.

When we started, I was the only employee for about two years and it’s rapidly grown to 120 staff and $20 million (US$13.2 million) worth of assets.

Where does the funding come from?

It comes from a wide variety of sources, but we still have in this country a pretty good social infrastructure. We’re having tough times at the moment, but the welfare state largely originated in Australia. A lot of those issues like payment of the politicians and issues like that – the secret ballot – originated here. The idea of a welfare state, however you define it, started here in Australia. We have a long history of almost bipartisan agreement that there needs to be some infrastructure, that it’s a necessary part of a civilized society. It’s similar to the Swedish model. It’s not trouble-free because there’s always right-wing or supply-driven economists who argue fiercely against it, but there always seems to be a core value.

We have here a public health system, public housing system and a minimum income through pensions and unemployment benefits, as well as an aged-care system. While I loved traveling through the US and England, the similarities between their systems were marked. We wouldn’t be able to build a Wintringham in the States, not without enormous philanthropic support. Because we have a public housing and an aged-care system, we can really start to address the needs of homeless people rather than just looking at the most basic ones or just trying to get the guys off the streets and a place to sleep for the night. That’s the thing that struck me most about the States and England – the people in my position were looking just at crisis work all the time, trying to get people out of the projects, off the streets, out of the shelters.

Some of the people were the most creative, exciting and stimulating people I’d ever met, and yet they weren’t able to access the types of resources that we were. I remember spending some time with a wonderfully impressive woman in Washington, and her company was the same age as ours. She said she spent about 75% of her time trying to get enough money to keep going one more year, whereas with us, each year we grow, and our growth is exponential. I no longer worry about trying to keep the company running – it’s how to create new services. I think this is symptomatic of the environments within her company and my company work within, which is the national, funding environment.

It’s very difficult to make comparisons from country to country because I simply don’t understand the US Medicare system, and even the political system is so different that it’s hard to compare. All I can say is that the infrastructure support is, at this stage, good enough in Australia (although it’s getting whittled down) to build a company like Wintringham.

Has the government responded to your company?

Yes, we get a lot of support from the government, both the state and federal governments. Increasingly we do their work. One of the interesting things is that the government is now getting out of service delivery and they’re actually asking, or tendering out, or contracting to welfare (or not-for-profit) companies, or for-profit companies – they’re moving into the market at a tremendous rate – to actually do the services of the government. They still provide the infrastructure support, but they don’t want to be involved in the management of it. There are opportunities to continue with that.

The main reason I like it here is because of the staff and their attitude.

They put the same value on everybody but they don’t treat us all

the same because each one needs something different from the other.

Mary Campbell

Wintringham has taken the stress out of everything

in the search for somewhere to live.

Doug McPetrie

When we saw the blueprint it seemed such a dream I never

thought would happen. Here you’ve got peace and tranquility.

You’re your own boss. And they look after you.

I’ve had a wonderful five years here.

Eric Monaghan

How has this changed the lives of the residents?

Dramatically. I think it’s probably the most marked development of what we do. You see the guys come in powerless, bedraggled – we get referrals from urinals, from the streets, from the most appalling conditions. You can’t believe it’s possible in a civilized society. The environments we build are beautiful, unashamedly beautiful. People respond to environments in ways we’re only beginning to understand how –they respond to a calm and dignified environment.

They start to change in their appearance. We’re not into rehabilitation in any way, but if people want it, we’ll access it for them. So if people want to stop drinking we’ll help them, but if they don’t then they still drink. If they’re too frail to go down the stairs then we’ll go and buy the groceries for them. We’ll go to the pub and buy the booze for them. We do not judge them – they’re free to exercise their freedom to the extent that it doesn’t impact on the freedoms of others.

They start to put on weight, they start to complain – I think that’s the biggest sign that we’re starting to get somewhere. They feel strong and confident enough to complain. If guys feel so terrified and intimidated by the night shelter where they’re working and living that if they complain they’ll get evicted, then for them to turn around and complain to us that whatever isn’t right, that’s great. On one hand you need to be careful that they haven’t got a justified reason to complain and that we’ve got to fix it. There’s also the element of great pride you take when a guy you’ve known for years feels strong enough and articulate enough, feels safe enough, to complain for himself and for others. It takes a lot of courage to look up at a Salvation Army officer and say, “I don’t like dormitories,” because he might say to you, “Well then get out.”

I’ll give you an example. At our first hostel, McLean Lodge, we employed a lady to set it up, and this was probably the hardest job I had to designate because it means I had to let it go.  She started work about a year before we opened our first hostel because she had to win the guys’ faith. This is a tough job. The guys trusted me implicitly, but I was becoming increasingly involved in setting up new services and wasn’t going to actually run the hostel. They had to give up the night shelter and come live at our place. As appalling as the night shelters are it’s still their home and people are very frightened of change. People have no idea what they’re getting themselves into, and while they trusted me they had to learn to trust her.  She spent hours and hours in the night shelter, taking men coffees and winning them over slowly.

One of the reasons that major aged-care providers said they wouldn’t take our guys is because the aged-care residential system that operates in Australia is in part based on a contribution system. This means that for some types of care, the resident is expected to pay an “ingoing contribution” that is means-tested on the resident’s current income and asset level. The owners of the facilities frequently used the loan of the contributions to fund the building of the homes for the aged. When the person eventually leaves the residential care facility, they (or their estate) are repaid this entry contribution minus some administration charges.

Obviously, for those people who have no assets (such as the homeless) it is impossible for them to pay this contribution. This was one of the major hurdles getting the homeless into the aged-care system.

The church-based owners would say that the reason they can’t take homeless people is because they can’t make the service pay if they don’t get paid. It wouldn’t be financially viable.

What I wanted to do with Wintringham is to run a one-hundred percent homeless aged-person hostel with residential care, without anyone paying any in-going fees. The government and everyone said it would never pay. Twenty percent, thirty percent, forty percent is unlikely, but one hundred percent – certainly it would never work.

Obviously it was of great concern whether it would work or not, but having done the budgets I felt it would, having seen a lot of inefficiencies in the major aged-care services. I suppose this is where my economics came into it, but I honestly felt this would work.

One of the reasons I felt it would work was the level of frailty of the guys coming in. The condition of the residents moving in was so frail that you would actually attract a government subsidy for the care you provide, which is dependent on the frailty of the people. One of the things we knew with McLean Lodge is that Diane had picked people who were largely incontinent – a sign of their frailty. On that basis we did our budgets, and on that basis I said it was going to work.

Now listen to this amazing story. Two weeks later all the residents moved in, and it was a very emotional day. There were tears everywhere. The buses came in and the guys, welcomed by me and a couple other people, would shuffle away to their place. That whole smell of night shelters would permeate them and their clothing. I don’t know if you’ve ever been into a night shelter, but they’re horrendous places. In 1993, after all those years, we opened our first hostel, and the guys came across from the night shelters into all these beautiful little houses we’d built for them.

After about two weeks Diane came to me and said, “We’ve got some problems. The guys we’ve got aren’t incontinent.” I said, “What are you talking about. We know they’re incontinent!” She said again that they’re not. Well, what that means is that our whole funding model, based on the frailty of the people, was totally buggered, and how were we going to make that work?

Anyway, we were able to solve that and make it work. In the meantime I went to find out why the guys weren’t incontinent, because we knew that they were. What we realized was that the guys were incontinent at the night shelter, where there was just a central shelter, because they were too frightened to go to the toilet because they’d get bashed.

If they hadn’t been bashed, some of their friends had got bashed, so they didn’t go because of that. They would piss into buckets and we’d empty their buckets for them, or they’d just wet the bed. And because they were isolated and too terrified to go out, of course they would drink more.

At Wintringham they all had a private bathroom, so they just went to the toilet.  If you’ve got a grandfather or father who’s very frail, or a grandmother, or just a good friend who’s very, very frail and can’t live on their own, can you imagine them living in a building where they’re too frightened to go to the toilet? At Wintringham, at the first hostel, and the others, they’re not as frightened. They drink more socially now rather than just to forget. Their whole demeanor changes.

They support each other and create their own rules. I remember going through one of the buildings with this old fellow I’d known for years, and a new guy came in and spat in the corner on this beautiful thick carpet we’d laid. I didn’t say anything, but the older guy I was with said to him, “You’re not at Gordon House anymore, pal.”

We’ve just opened a brand-new twenty-room complex where everyone has a bedroom, an en-suite, and a lounge with living room and dining room that’s fully equipped with stove, fridges (which are full of food for the first day), sheets, mattresses, flowers – the whole lot, plus a community room. On the first day when all the residents were sort of shuffling around getting used to each other, they had an impromptu meeting.

These meetings are the type of thing that those of us who’ve had reasonable educations would be comfortable with, but a lot of our guys are not comfortable with meetings at all. But they decided to have a meeting and decided they would ban smoking in the community room. The place is only three weeks old at this point, but they don’t smoke in the common room, which has a pool table, a telly, and comfortable seats. I don’t care whether they do or not, but some of them don’t smoke, so they made this common agreement. They’re going to smoke in their houses or in the beautiful gardens. We have a lot of water features with fish, and that’s very soothing and calming.

These are little stories, but what it means is that people are taking control of their lives and control of their environment.

Your architect Allen Kong has incorporated the Chinese system of feng shui into his architecture. Do you think this plays a part in the residents’ positive response to their environment?

I can’t say. Allen’s our only architect, and he started his company round the same time we started Wintringham. He was the only person at his company and I was the only person at mine, and both companies have grown. He still only does Wintringham stuff. We’ve become close personal friends, too.

But, look, I don’t understand feng-shui, and I don’t want to pretend I do, but it guides Allen’s life. You’ll have to ask him. He would say yes, it works, and I would say whatever. I have no idea. I mean, the buildings are beautiful and soft. We use soft materials. A lot of materials in public housing projects are all brick and steel. We use soft cedars, weather boards, and verandahs and gardens. We use some brick, but it’s a combination of materials. Cedar windows and cedar doors – the guys don’t trash them. They go from homeless to house-proud. They see where they live, they know how beautiful it is, and they look after it. They take a great deal of pride in it, showing people where they live.

How are people chosen to come there?

We have street workers, and they go out and find these people. We’re pretty well known now, so if someone comes across an aged-homeless person, they ring up Wintringham and we assess them. We assess them in accordance with the Commonwealth aged-care system, but that’s just to get funding, to make sure they’re eligible. We have a huge waiting list now, and it’s a very difficult and agonizing decision of who goes in and who doesn’t. There’s an enormous difference between living in a dormitory when you’re old and frail with a bunch of young toughs, and moving into one of the beautiful things we’ve built. It’s a hard decision but essentially it has to be made.

We’re opening 20 units in the city now and we’ve had over a hundred applications. We closed those applications about eight months ago because we didn’t think it was fair to let people keep applying. The demand far outstrips the supply.

Just to go back, when we started working at Gordon House, one of the things we’ve tried to keep in our minds is a social justice principle. I think one of the things that came to us was that the night shelters and the people who ran them saw these people as homeless and aged. But I saw them as aged and homeless. That’s not just semantics, but it’s a whole new paradigm of thinking. If you say that the person is homeless and aged, then it’s okay that they’re in a homeless service. But if you say that they’re aged and homeless, it’s like saying they’re aged and American or aged and Greek, or aged and one-legged – they’re aged, fundamentally, so they should be part of the aged-care system.

We didn’t try to go into the homeless person system – we actually left. I went to see the aged-care government minister, and told him about it. That’s how it started, and that’s how it’s continued. It’s actually been a highly specialized company accessing generic funds, the generic funds of the aged-care system. We’re saying that the fact they’re homeless is irrelevant – what’s important is that they’re aged. The prime area of the person is Australia, therefore the person should be part of the Australian system, and not be isolated and marginalized. These guys have fought wars, raised families, paid taxes, drank their beer, whatever. They’ve been good citizens, bad citizens, they’ve played footy for the local club. They’re ordinary people and should be entitled to the same services the rest of the Australians take for granted.

That’s the guiding philosophy we have. We don’t want people to have anything special, anything better. We want them to have access to mainstream services. We build them far more beautiful things, and I take a great deal of perverted pride in knowing the aged-care system wouldn’t take our guys and yet we build things far nicer than the aged-care system. That’s why we won that international stuff, like the United Nations World Habitat Award. They’re beautiful places – far nicer than the places where we live privately!

For you personally, has any part of your belief in social justice been motivated by something spiritual?

Well, I’m sorry there hasn’t been. I actually am not a believer. I have a huge distrust of organized religion. I think the Buddhist tradition is the closest thing to what I’d believe in, because from what I understand it’s something I’d have more affinity towards. I’m really an atheist, and what I’ve based this on is a sense of social justice.

Now, that is a philosophical position, you’re quite right. But it’s a philosophical position that emanates from me and from values I hold dear. They’re not based on a divine authority or presence that instructs me to treat people a certain way – it’s a thing in itself. I think to that extent it would probably resonate, because Buddhists also believe it’s a thing in itself. I don’t believe in a higher authority, I guess, because I’ve seen too many instances of injustice perpetrated by religious organizations. My father suffered through the Second World War because of that, and I’m watching the church leaders stand back and watch it happen. I’ve seen instances here in Australia, and around the world too, where religions have stood back and watched the homeless suffer. Or if they have helped, they’ve helped from a patronizing or condescending, deserving-and-undeserving poor mentality.

For me I see that those justices have got to be sprung from within, not from a world view – to me it’s simply a social justice issue that’s very easy to explain, and it aligns with my politics. I guess I’m a socialist. One of my favorite quotes, and I don’t know who said it, is, “Atheism is a non-profit organization.” I love that. We’re a non-profit organization in the sense that we don’t generate a profit, but also in the sense that our views are based on social justice.

That’s not to say we don’t employ people who are very passionate in their religion – we do, of a wide variety of religions. But they’re asked to keep that in their pocket, they’re not allowed to proselytize. We have clients who are very religious and who want to see a priest, so we organize it. We don’t let people come in and peddle their wares. It’s a sanctuary from all that. I think you do have to have something that guides you, whatever it is. I personally think that if it’s something like social justice that doesn’t relate to a higher authority, it’s more liable that you’ll be consistent to it, because you’ll be more consistent with it based on your own convictions.

I know a lot of religious people hold these views, too, so I’m not saying they’re incompatible, but I’ve seen a lot of people who are so riddled with inconsistencies that it’s more than just the peculiarities of that individual. You’re actually having people who, part of the week, are being very holy and the rest of the week are screwing their neighbors within an inch of their lives; part of the week feeling a sense of social justice, but only within what they can afford. I think social justice is the reason all of our guys and all of our staff have rights. I’ve lived and worked in non-unionized situations, so I know the benefits of unionism, and I’m strongly supportive of it. We all have rights and they should all be protected.

I’ve had a lot of support and help to do this, so I wouldn’t want someone to think I’ve done this on my own – a lot of support and help. I think people have a lot of goodness in them if you give them a chance to express it. Very rarely are there people who don’t want to help us once they understand. I think a lot of people get caught up in their own worlds and don’t have a chance to help. I can’t really comment on other people – it’s too hard. It’s hard enough trying to understand your own little brain!

Has your work inspired other people in Australia to do the same thing?

I would like to think so, but sometimes I’m not too sure if much has changed. The large church-based, welfare, not-for-profit, aged-care providers are still not really interested in providing high quality non-judgmental services to the very poor and homeless. It’s the same story all over the world – you need to have a dollar to get good services.

I’ve lived in boarding houses and pubs all over the place, but things

weren’t working out. I only weighed 60 kilos when I came here and now I’m 80 kilos — I’m going to send you blokes broke!

Peter Stevens

A man’s got to settle down sooner or later. This came up and I’ve got

a place of my own for the first time ever. I’ve never known a home

as I have now.

Barry Searle

Here, the people are not scared. They’re cleaner and more happy, more

positive. It’s all people, you see. You treat people nice, they’re nice.

Housekeeper Angela Colina

Where would you like Wintringham to go in the future?

We decided from day one we’d only do one thing: we’d only work with elderly homeless. We wouldn’t do anything else. We only have one core value and that’s social justice. These two things are very explain to politicians, to staff, international journalists – whoever!

It’s a very simple thing to say we only work with elderly homeless, and we work solely from a principle of social justice. That means we’re trying to provide one-stop shopping for elderly homeless. We’re essentially trying to provide them with an environment that gives them dignity for their final years.

One of the things I’ve noticed since coming into welfare, and what I’ve noticed in the States, is that the companies are increasingly generic. They’re like the Salvation Army or something. They are all things to all people: youth training program, unemployment, domestic care, non-violence services, night shelters – they’re doing all these different things, and I think that’s impossible. It’s like having a complete understanding of all religions, and I just don’t think it’s possible.

We used to find at Gordon House that the skill level that we had was a function of whom we employed at the time, that there wasn’t any residual information within the company – it was the product of the particular worker. A worker with great interest in domestic violence might come to us and all of a sudden we’d have a reputation for being good in domestic violence. She’d leave and we would be back to square one. So I think it’s partly driven by the whole notion of empires, and the astringency of funding –opportunistic funding where you’ll hear there’s two million dollars going for youth support services, then you win it and you never provide a youth support service.

We initially started with McLean Lodge as a medium-care, residential aged-care service, but what we’re doing now is going in either direction. We’re going into high-care and we’re going into simple housing with no care; we’re doing street work, community care, and we do a lot of advocacy work. Anywhere along the continuum of aged-care service is fair game with us – that’s what we’ll go for. We’ll never move into areas that don’t affect elderly homeless as long as I’m running Wintringham. We’ll never do youth services – not because it’s not needed, but we think it’s best for someone else to do it. Our focus should never be anything other than aged-care service. There’s not much interest in the aged-homeless work.

We have a saying here in Australia that says “kiss” – “Keep it simple, stupid.” Keep it simple, stupid. It’s a lot wiser than the joking sound of it. If you keep it simple and don’t confuse it with too much jargon and political rhetoric, it’s something workers can identify and seize upon and stick out their chest with pride that they’re actually doing this. They can easily explain it to everybody, and more importantly they can explain it to themselves. They have a coat hanger on which they can hang their views. When they get stressed or confused they can talk to people or talk to themselves – they can take it back to their core values. They have a reference point that’s very simple. I have a lot of friends who run big organizations, and they say they were started in the same way Wintringham was: to work with the elderly poor. A lot of them have changed and integrated programs for elderly rich and middle class, and they say it will be a great challenge for Wintringham not to go that way.

But I think it’s simple: we just won’t start down that path. We won’t try to subsidize and start hostels in rich areas so we can earn money. You start to do that, and before you know it, your values have changed and you start to attract different people to the board and to the staff. They start to say, “Well, we’ve got to earn a little bit more money to do that thing,” and they want more and more, and soon enough the whole values have changed. We’re getting so much work we can’t handle it, so there’s no need to start down any other road.

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