It’s HEATHER MAJAURY’s 60th Birthday and she wants you to support the Outta Work Actors Kaleidoscope Two Minute Play Laboratory as her milestone gift! Donations can be made directly from the canadahelps.org, a central website for donating to any Canadian registered charity. Donations to Kaleidoscope Collective are made through the Social Development Centre Waterloo Region page on the canadahelps site .

In the “Donate to this charity” window, choose “Kaleidoscope Collective” from the dropdown menu of available funds for donation.  You can make a one-time donation or opt to donate an amount on a monthly basis.  Either would be much appreciated and will help sustain this important and exciting work!

Here’s the full story on how the laboratory got started:

“Three years ago Heather Majaury started a community based-applied theatre Laboratory focusing on issues related to Housing Precarity and Homelessness. She started by working with the Social Development Centre’s Unsheltered Campaign by holding Tuesday evening drop in sessions where she introduced people to different games exercises and techniques that helped people make sense of their circumstances, get to know one another, and take action in their lives.

What we learned together was there are members of our community who have been silenced, who are invisible – whose stories will never be told….and there are members of our community who look from a distance in judgement – their vision often clouded by stereotypes and things they do not understand.

We were originally supported by the Upstream Fund in 2022 to hold an experimental 2 week long laboratory where we supported 15 participants to learn many techniques, games, and exercises that would help them build a vocabulary and skills  to support the animation of narratives shared by community for community within dramatizing story sharing circles. We worked with over 30 people as community animators, apprentices and story sharers and this became the initial prototype we called the Two Minute Play Laboratory 1.0 where we collaborated with a new eviction prevention program at the Social Development Centre as well as a pilot project with the SDCWR and the City of Kitchener called the Lived Expertise Working Group and with A Better Tent City.

The results have been varied. Some people found the laboratory a stepping stone to building their personal confidence and explore other goals and interests but felt that their participation helped them reset and build confidence while also looking at the role of precarity in shaping  their lives and choices. Others have found inspiration and purpose as community animators and actors and have participated in Laboratory 2.0 where we were able to demonstrate a proof of concept in transforming 5 personal narratives of struggles with Hidden Homelessness while being Female, Homelessness while being a newcomer to Canada, experiencing Child apprehension while navigating Homelessness and Housing Precarity,  Working as Peer Support in Eviction Prevention and the Challenges of becoming Homeless in Later Years, and What happens in a Tiny House Neighbourhood when the Need Grows but Capacity remains the same.  All of these stories help us to connect to our shared humanity while addressing current realities in our systems and economy that create difficult circumstances.

The Canadian Dream is a short play that focuses on the Journey of one of the participating Story Holders who experienced unsheltered homelessness while attempting to navigate the points system to earn an invitation for permanent residency.  It is performed by people who participated in the first two laboratories who are under similar pressures and by Canadian Born and Indigenous participants who have lived experience with homelessness and homelessness advocacy. We want to build more opportunities for the Laboratory to explore these issues and we need to fund our activities including finding financial support for paying our creators, our story holders, and making sure we have the infrastructure in place to support our activities. Heather would like to use her birthday as a way to raise money for these efforts and has set the goal at 5,000.00. This will help pay for insurance to cover both the liability for Board Members of the Outta Work Actors for the next year in a start up capacity. Because she was able to register the group as a Federal Not for Profit. It takes a lot of work to put everything in place to make a not for profit group viable. Your support will also help us buy supplies that help us continue to the work and pay for costs like our website domain and if needed we can use funds to support more presentations of Canadian Dream in our local community.”

Please help Heather by giving to the Outta Work Actors Kaleidoscope Two Minute Play Laboratory.