project overview
Hospitality Hub| New Hub Hotel Commissions
Artists: Lisa Williamson (Staircase)
Hope Hudson (Family Room)
Taropop: Kong Wee Pang + Jay Crum (Dining Room)
Total budget:
Family room: $7,500 (includes three finalist honoraria of $500 each)
Dining room: $7,500 (includes three finalist honoraria of $500 each)
Staircase: $10,000 (includes three finalist honoraria of $500 each)
Upcoming benchmark/update: Schematic Design
Next committee meeting date: April 2023.
BACKGROUND
About Hospitality Hub:
The Hospitality Hub was founded in 2007 as Memphis’ single point of entry into the Continuum of Care for individuals experiencing homelessness. The Hub partners with nearly 200 organizations in the fight against our community’s most extreme form of poverty, and our innovative programs and effective operations have established us as a leader. We have the capacity and the vision to work alongside civic leaders to get things done on behalf of those we serve. Partnering with the City Council, Mayor Strickland, Mayor Lee, and the County Commission, alongside the NGOs at the Downtown Memphis Commission and the Memphis Medical District Collaborative, the Hospitality Hub is executing the adaptive re-use of the city-owned former vehicle inspection station at 590 Washington Ave into a day plaza, expanded Hub office, and emergency shelter for women. The opportunities of the plaza/shelter at 590 Washington are a great development for Memphis’ most vulnerable population. The Hospitality Hub serves all unhoused individuals in the City of Memphis and Shelby County. We see the majority of our guests at our main campus at 590 Washington. From here we do extensive case management and offer direct services to help people find a path out of homelessness. Our direct services include but are not limited to providing shelter, referring to shelter, supporting individuals to obtain necessary documents to be eligible for permanent housing, connecting and transporting people to detox, recovery, mental health services, both temporary work and permanent jobs. The Hospitality Hub, or as it’s known in this space, “The Hub,” partners with dozens of nonprofits, government agencies, hospitals, universities, and businesses to provide the most effective services and opportunities possible for our unhoused neighbors.
About Dragonfly Collective:
Dragonfly is a social impact development firm specializing in harnessing market forces to create and implement social change. With initiatives ranging from healthcare to homelessness, Dragonfly represents an economy where business and nonprofits align bottom-line interests and the public good. They work closely with the Hub every day.
When available data didn’t reflect the demand for shelter for women experiencing homelessness, Dragonfly created an assessment tool to capture the reality: while nearly 40% of individuals experiencing homelessness were women, they had access to only 6% of the available beds.
SCOPE OF WORK
UAC and The City of Memphis, in partnership with the Hospitality Hub are seeking an artist to create a Trauma-Informed work of art that can be hung in the central staircase.
The goal of Trauma-Informed Care (TIC) is to avoid re-traumatizing someone. “Re-traumatizing refers to inadvertently recreating some conditions of a persons’ previous trauma, causing them to relive it in the moment.” Trauma-informed care aims to help people find meaning and purpose in their lives, fulfill valued roles and engage in a life in a community of their choosing, see themselves as more than their trauma(s), help people identify and pursue avenues to reducing distress and problems in their lives and exercise personal autonomy and self-determination in making choices. Trauma-informed care means shifting from the medical question of “What’s wrong with you?” to the trauma-informed question of “What’s happened to you?”
*for information visit:
https://smiadviser.org/knowledge_post/what-does-it-mean-to-be-trauma-informed
Trauma-Informed Design
Trauma-informed practices extend into all aspects of the Hospitality Hub’s services but for the purposes of this call, artists are asked to take the following parameters into account:
- Pieces should be soothing and calming with very little red, yellow or orange which are trigger colors
- Bringing the outdoors in is always good, so nature, landscapes, natural materials, etc.
- Abstract can be difficult since it's so open to interpretation but as long as it's soothing and soft, it's fine.
- Rounded edges and shapes vs. jagged and sharp.
- Metal is ok as long as it isn't sharp or shiny and doesn't look industrial. Wood or plastic is better.
The majority of Hospitality Hub clients will be coming straight off the streets, where they've suffered a multitude of traumas. The Hub’s goal is to create a healing cocoon for them in which to rest.
*for more information visit:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesnonprofitcouncil/2019/12/09/the-importance-of-trauma-infor
