A shared home for community-led change
Bringing the four pillars together
Changemakers House is a place where community-led work actually happens.
It operates from a home in the neighbourhood — a converted family house, rented townhouse, or shared residential space — and is intentionally designed to feel like a home, not a service centre or institution.
People come to Changemakers House to learn, meet, run projects, build businesses, and take on leadership roles. Programs are shaped by the people who use the space, not delivered to them from outside.
Changemakers House exists to provide something most community work lacks: a stable, locally held place where leadership, learning, and collective action can grow over time.
Why it matters
Many community initiatives operate out of temporary venues or institutional settings that are disconnected from everyday life. This makes it harder to build trust, continuity, and shared ownership.
Changemakers House addresses this gap by anchoring community-led work in a physical place that people recognise as their own. It creates the conditions for long-term relationships, informal learning, and shared responsibility.
Because the House is locally led and supported by community-owned enterprises, it is not dependent on short-term grants to exist. This protects community priorities from constant disruption and allows work to evolve over time.
How the house operates
Each Changemakers House is:
Locally led, with facilitators and organisers drawn from the surrounding community
Community-funded, supported by co-owned businesses incubated through Enkindle
Governed, not informally run, with clear accountability and decision-making structures
Flexible, able to host different kinds of activity without being locked into a single program model
Shoshama provides governance support, seed funding, and systems oversight, but the day-to-day life of the House is shaped by the people who use it.
The four pillars, in practice
Changemakers House is where the four pillars of the Empowerment Ecosystem come together in one place.
Knowledge Workshop
Community-led learning and research
Each House supports local inquiry and action research. Community members investigate their own questions, document lived experience, and contribute insight to policy, practice, and public debate.
People are not research subjects. They are involved in deciding what questions matter, how information is gathered, and how findings are shared.
Enkindle Enterprise
Financial sustainability through co-owned business
Changemakers House incubates small, purpose-led enterprises that generate income for individuals and reinvest resources back into the community.
All Enkindle businesses operate under a shared profit model:
40% to the business owners
20% shared among employees
40% to Shoshama community initiatives
This model supports livelihoods while also sustaining the House itself, reducing reliance on grants and external funding.
Bridge Under the Same Sky
Intercultural dialogue and traditional knowledge
Each House creates space for people to connect across culture, faith, and generation through conversation, food, storytelling, and shared practice.
Culture and spirituality are treated as central to community life, not optional extras. Non-Western ways of knowing, ancestral traditions, and First Nations knowledge are respected and integrated alongside contemporary approaches.
This work strengthens trust and supports leadership grounded in lived values.
Changemakers Collective
Grassroots leadership and lived-experience pathways
Changemakers House is where people move from participation into leadership.
Community members are supported to become facilitators, organisers, mentors, business operators, and decision-makers. Leadership development is practical and ongoing, built through real roles rather than short courses or one-off training.
The pathway is local, relational, and long-term.
What makes Changemakers House different
Changemakers House is not a community centre or a commercial venue.
It is a residence - open to the community members who actively participate in running it day to day. Members organise their own responses to the issues they face, supported by stable infrastructure, local leadership, and community-owned resources.
Over time, each House becomes more than a meeting place. It become a base for community-led systems change - owned by the people who use it and shaped by the place it serves.