Globe Aroma

Globe Aroma is an Open Arts House for newcomers, refugees and asylum seekers. Everyone is welcome at Globe Aroma, a place where art and culture are central, where everybody can meet and feel at home.

Globe Aroma offers space, time, creative support and a network to artists, creatives and culture lovers. The Open Arts House is a low-threshold artistic sanctuary where dialogue, collaboration, networking, creation and cultural experience are central.

An URGENT EMBRACE

An Urgent Embrace is a sister tool, deriving from the SOS Relief, it was built specifically for the GLOBE AROMA community for mainly 2 reasons:

1. URGENCY AND SCALE

From the beginning of SOS RELIEF, we urged our community to apply but as the SOS relief was reaching a large spread of applicants all over the country, the possibility of receiving help on time became impossible. Given the urgent need of the specific community (lacking other social structures of support and not only economically), multiplying the tool and jumping from a large pool of requests to a smaller, more intimate scale made sense. The importance of creating a tool tailored to the community and communicating about it in a rather different way, reaching out primarily to the same community of members, partners and allies gave solidarity and reciprocation a spatial element and a center that also renewed the “vows” of the community to stick together for each other.

2. CASH FLOW

A major difference from SOS Relief applicants, in the case of illegalised artists, is the absence of Bank accounts, if a member could not find or use the bank transfer option, the URGENT EMBRACE offered the opportunity to people to request CASH. It is something that a lot of people don’t think about, but once we asked our “givers”, people were often more than willing to give cash. That meant a bigger effort on both sides; people had to drop by the space and hand or collect envelopes directly to and from the team. This action flow fed the space with energy, hope and physical contact, helped to reconnect and reestablish community after the long pause. but also ensured complete anonymity, which is hard to maintain when you need to transfer by bank.

ANONYMITY AND COMMUNITY, a social contract

Anonymity played a big role in how the tool functioned. It gave people the right to not tell their story and perform a role (that of the artist or the newcomer), and be judged as worthy or unworthy of support. People who applied did not have to perform poverty, the only criteria of eligibility was if they were part of the community in some way or had been in the past. The tool was built on trust; people gave simply to other people, knowing only that it is a person from within the community that needs the support, and nothing more. Going beyond supporting just the artistic work of individuals but ensuring the wellbeing of an ecosystem. We strongly believe in Globe Aroma, that that kind of support of each other is a very fertile base for making art and culture together. To know that we can rely on each other and take risks together.

SOLIDARITY BETWEEN ORGANISATIONS

SOTA helped us create the URGENT EMBRACE tool with different means and target groups. Globe Aroma as a non profit organisation was recently able to help SOTA to further develop SOS Relief by applying for funding that SOTA is structurally not eligible to apply for. This shows once more the importance of building solidarity networks, sharing resources, access and redistributing them not only on the level of individuals but also between organisations.

CELEBRATION

The Urgent Embrace platform is now closed, but we still have to officially announce and celebrate its closure. The plan is to communicate and celebrate the success of the tool in the first week of Summer of Globe in July, when the people who made this tool possible are coming together again at Globe Aroma space to celebrate community and art making by following workshops,concerts, talks and party side by side!!.