A symposium in three parts: Women and Housing, Women and Homelessness and First nation women’s spaces. Each part explores the futuring of our habitats and explores design-led positive disruptions. Women and Housing will address our understanding of spaces for women, by women and the significance of gender in design thinking. Women and Homelessness will explore the spatial needs and the provision of safe housing for women experiencing domestic violence. First Nations Women’s Spaces will focus on how specific needs play out spatially, looking at the family, country and sustainable on-site communities. Experts in each area will address these issues in a discussion forum.

Introduction and opening of event 9.30 am.

Panel 1: Women and Housing - designing solutions

09.30 am - 11.20 am

Speakers

Sophie Dyring - Director Schored Projects. Sophie is a passionate affordable housing advocate. As an architect and landscape architect her practice largely designs and delivers social and affordable housing for those most in need. Complementing practice Sophie has presented at conferences and written articles on the topic and is on the Moreland Affordable Housing Committee.

Judy Line - CEO Women’s Housing Limited. Judy Line has worked in the housing and homelessness sector since 1986 and has been CEO at Women’s Housing Ltd since 2005.  Since joining WHL, the agency has grown from a small transitional housing manager to a Housing Association that now provides long term social housing and specialises in building new affordable housing for women and their children.

Dr Kate Raynor - Post Doctoral Research Fellow Transforming Housing, The University of Melbourne. Kate is a Post-Doctoral Researcher currently involved with the University of Melbourne’s Affordable Housing Initiative. Her work is concerned with inter-sectoral partnerships, innovation and policy to generate social and affordable housing. 

Justine Hadj - Business Development Manager ABD Group. Justine has held a number of roles in the construction industry including health and safety, design, project management and coordination. Justine co-founded a revolutionary built environment blog called Gazella, an independent publication to showcase women’s success stories working in the built environment.

Panel 2: Women, Refuges and Homelessness - designing dignity

12.20 pm - 2.10 pm

Speakers

Samantha Donnelly - PhD Candidate in the XYX Lab. Samantha is researching the spatial conditions of women's refuges and currently lectures at the University of Technology Sydney.

Professor Jude McCulloch - Director Monash Family Violence Prevention Centre, Criminology, School of Social Sciences. Jude is a criminologist whose research investigates the integration of war and crime, police and the military, and security and crime control. Her recent research projects focus on crime risk, prevention and family violence.

Amanda Donohoe - CEO Servants Community Housing. Amanda has an extensive history working in the sector and has spent many years working among Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory in crisis housing, development and education roles.

Kris Greenwood - Director TEN Women Networking Group. Kris is a director of TEN Women Networking Group, a team of ten high profile women in the property industry with a mandate to facilitate empowerment for women through business or philanthropic opportunities. Kris currently sits on several boards including Housing All Australians.

Helen Matthews - Helen’s road out of homelessness was a long and complicated one that impassioned her to make a difference. A hard-working advocate for ending homelessness, Helen works with both the CHP and the Lived Experience Advisory Group (LEAG) at Launch Housing. She is also a member of the Moreland Housing Matters Committee.

 Panel 3: Indigenous Women's Spaces - design beyond housing

3.10 pm - 4.45 pm

Speakers

Jenny Samms - Director of the Council for Homeless Persons and of the Foyer Foundation. Alongside these roles Jenny is a research fellow at Monash University, Deputy Chair of its Indigenous Advisory Council, and a member of the Minister for Housing’s Victorian Family Violence Housing Task Force. Jenny has a long career working in Government and more recently as CEO of Aboriginal Housing Victoria (AHV), where she led the organisation to achieve accreditation as a Housing Association and successfully negotiated the historic agreement with the Victorian Government to transfer ownership to AHV of the some 1450 DHHS houses that DHHS was managing. She has worked with the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service as a strategic adviser. 

Nicky Mcnamara - Project Manager Aboriginal Housing Victoria. Nicky is a Landscape Architect who been designing, planning and building with Aboriginal communities in Victoria and Central Australia. She is currently a project coordinator at Aboriginal Housing Victoria. She is also a member of the Australian Institute of landscape architects Connection to Country Committee. 

 Dr Kelly Greenop -  Lecturer, School of Architecture, University of Queensland. Kelly is a senior lecturer in the School of Architecture at the University of Queensland. Her research focuses on work with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people using ethnographic techniques to document the place experiences and attachment, and the importance of architecture, place, family and country for urban Indigenous people. With colleagues from the Aboriginal Environments Research Centre (AERC) she has also conducts research into Aboriginal housing, particularly with respect to crowding and homelessness.

First Nations women tenants - lived experience

Image credit: SHECity 2018. Image credit: Monash University XYX Lab