How crowdfunding can connect people to their heritage and community
The glistening white sails of Sydney Opera House and the red brick and bluestone of Geelong’s industrial mills have little in common at first glance. But for both these places crowdfunding has led people to connect with these buildings.
Hubcaps to Creative Hubs (#Hc2CH) is a research project led by Deakin University. It aims to document the changing narrative of Geelong by creating a series of short films on how the community conserves and transforms the region’s rust-bucket heritage into places of creative enterprise.
Working with Creative Geelong Inc, project funds have been successfully raised through Deakin University’s Research My World program. This is an established collaboration with Australian-based crowdfunding platform Pozible.
Two buildings we are focusing on are the bluestone Fyansford Paper Mills, a world-class facility when it opened in the 1870s, and the red brick Federal Woollen Mills, which the federal government built in the lead-up to the first world war to supply cloth for military uniforms.