October at Open House is jam-packed with exciting events on housing and homelessness. Here’s a short taster of what’s to come but if you’d like more information, please have a look at out What’s On page or find us on Facebook. On the 3rd October, we’re hosting Dr Sara Reis from the Women’s Budget Group to talk about their latest report ‘A Home of Her Own, Women & Housing’. Sara will be joined by

We’re entering our final two-months at Open House and we’re in need of some more volunteers to keep the energy going until we close our doors on the 26th October. We’ve lost a few volunteers to the transience of Oxford recently and we’re in need of some sparky new faces to make the final period as great as possible. We’re on the hunt for friendly, kind and reliable people to volunteer as hosts for

We’re launching ‘Oxford is My Home’ a community-made magazine to tell the hidden stories of housing & homelessness in Oxford. The magazine represents a collaboration between Open House, and the Oxford Poetry Library and is supported by Lankelly Chase. Together, we’ve worked with individuals in Oxford to create a series of poems, stories, illustrations, collages, recorded conversations and journalistic articles which explore what it means to call Oxford ‘home’. Readers of Issue One will

The Open House team of wonderful volunteers are taking a well-earned Summer holiday. We’ll be closed for August but will be back in September for a bumper month of events. The last few months have seen visits from the likes of Guy Shrubsole, Charlie Luxton, Maff Potts, Annelise Dodds MP, Vijay Prashad, Asad Rehman, James Meadway, Pat McArdle and Cat Hobbs. We’ve talked about public land ownership, sustainable architecture, housing & a ‘green new

Lucille is part of a group of concerned Oxford renters who are working to establish a tenants union to make renting in the city fairer, more secure and more affordable. In the no man’s land of tenants’ rights, Oxford is a city of great power and inequality, where ⅔ of the population is renting. The influx of wealthy students, high paid university staff and transient nature of this population has exacerbated people’s powerlessness. Oxford

Transition by Design, the architecture and design cooperative behind Open House have written about the ideas behind Open House. In this Medium post they ask weather by creating a space that is actively welcoming to people without a permanent home and including them in the conversations that are being had about housing in the city, can we encourage a movement to create a fairer housing system that has a lived experience of homelessness in

Do you have an idea for building relationships and connecting people with place that could do with a £1000 cash injection? As part of this year’s Marmalade, Transition by Design and Lankelly Chase are running a live experiment in participatory grant making. Both Transition by Design and Lankelly Chase believe that more often then not, it’s communities who know best what they need. We’re experimenting with how to hand over control of funding to

Ten weeks, thirty-four volunteers, twenty-two events and several thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles in, we are delighted to say that Open House is open and thriving. Our public living room is open Wednesday to Saturday 10-5 and is welcoming people from all sorts of backgrounds and experiences from across Oxford to drink tea, make new friends and talk to strangers about housing. On top of this, our ‘Housing Matters’ series of talks have welcomed an incredible range of thinkers, doers