Over the past eight years Home Is Where The Hall Is has seen hundreds of community led projects occur in the stunning community halls of regional Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania.
Today Regional Arts Victoria announces that the Home Is Where the Hall Is initiative has come to a close. After eight wonderful years of community driven activity, we could not be more thrilled with the project.
Early years of the program saw all sorts of activity including bake-offs, dance competitions, photography exhibitions and film nights, and the most recent year of the program saw Bollywood dancing, a mad hatters tea party, house concerts and kinder ballet. You could almost say we have ‘seen it all’.
Halls are special places, and the past nine years have demonstrated just how much these spaces mean to the diverse communities of Regional Australia. Halls hold memories. They build partnerships. They are the places we gather, mourn, celebrate, share and connect. In an age when social isolation is at a peak, and we have the wonders of the internet to access and disseminate culture far and wide (often directly to our lounge rooms and homes), this project reflected in a very public way the ability for physical places to positively impact our sense of community and communality.
Today we look back across the programs’ history and adopt a celebratory lens. We would like to take this moment to congratulate all of the incredible events that have been part of this project, and offer thanks to all of the passionate community leaders who enabled such innovative programming in our community halls.
As this chapter of the project closes, one cannot help think upon the legacy created by this project. Rising from the energy of Home Is Where The Hall Is we are thrilled to see such initiatives as Regional Arts Victoria’s Connecting Places. We encourage you to get in touch with the RAV team to talk about these programs if they are of interest.
Regional Arts Victoria would like to acknowledge that this project was made possible with support of the Federal Government Regional Arts Fund through the Strategic Projects initiative from 2012-2016.
We would also like to acknowledge our project partners Tasmania Regional Arts and Country Arts South Australia, without whom the expansion of this project across borders would not have been possible.
