Recipes for Baking Belonging into Housing: Zola’s journey from Homelessness to Homefullness

Show host Zola shares her personal experience with housing instability through a creative reading of her unpublished article titled 'Homefullness: Recipes for Baking, Belonging, Connection, and Resilience into Housing Futures.' Zola details her struggles with feelings of homelessness due to the challenge of finding available, affordable accommodation and precarious short-term house and room rentals, despite her professional background and stable income.  She highlights the systemic issues in housing policies and market forces that creates housing insecurity for many working people in our society as well as for single mothers and older women. She explores how collective housing can offer homefullness but that these models are in short supply due to many factors such as inhospitable legislation, lack of developer interest, and unavailable bank lending or funding.  Zola offers practical 'recipes' for creating more connected and resilient communities for people "in situ" or creating from scratch. The episode serves as both a personal testimony and a call to action for systemic change in housing development, funding, and legislation. Timestamps: 00:43 Zola’s Personal Story: A Recipe for Homelessness 03:45 Her Struggles with Housing Instability 17:38 The Broken Housing System 25:10 Collective Housing Solutions 30:22 Homefullness Recipes for Transformation: In Situ and Collective Housing 38:19 Call to Action: Creating Homefullness—what you can do no matter where or who you are.   Show Links: Common Ground website &  newsletter sign up:https://www.commonground.net.nz/ Become part of the Homefullness Patreon Community: https://www.patreon.com/commonground_zola The article and companion document of resources is not yet ready for release.  Sign up to the Common Ground newsletter to get alerted when I’ve made this available.