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About Us

Why We Exist

To provide housing solutions & employment to educate & empower women & young people experiencing or at-risk of homelessness in WA.

Who We Are

We believe in the inherent value of people. We believe in dignity, respect and freedom. We believe in human rights. We strive towards applying these beliefs, and is our motivation to everything that we do. It is simple, but this is our ‘why’.

Our Story

Our founder Katie experienced both a redundancy and job loss during her accounting career – the latter which led to her two-month long camping trip in Africa and also time in a 110ha garbage dump in Jakarta.

These pivotal moments changed her life. She rediscovered her passions which she’d lost in the corporate world; immersing herself in research, volunteering and trying to understand life. Not of her own, but the lives of those less fortunate.

This led to the birth of The Underground Collaborative in 2017, the name designed to bring light to otherwise ‘taboo’ topics, and help address systemic issues through collaboration.

Ground+Co’s ‘Billie’ coffee cart was TUC’s first employment initiative, launching in 2019 in partnership with Brookfield Properties. Sadly, due to COVID-19 we bid farewell to Billie in March 2020 – however, Ground+Co has since established a permanent flagship home inside the Perth Cultural Centre in partnership with the State Library of WA.

Our vision for the future is to support, uplift and cultivate systemic change to break the cycles of homelessness through employment and long-term housing solutions to empower women and young people in WA.

Our Foundations

Our guiding principles are to educate, empower and employ through which we believe together, will lead to ripples and waves of change to help break the cycles of homelessness.

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Educate

We aim to provide ongoing knowledge to our partners, and create safe learning environments for our Team Members. We seek to educate our community through sharing stories and generating meaningful conversations to positively influence attitudes, behaviours and beliefs whilst overcoming common misconceptions and stigmas surrounding homelessness and its underlying causes.

Empower

When you empower another person, you invest in yourself and take a risk that has the potential to change another person’s life and providing the agency for them to choose. Additionally, you are simultaneously enriching yourself with their story, their culture and their purpose. For our community, we want to empower you to disrupt homelessness in a sustainable and meaningful way.

Employ

Work Integration Social Enterprises support the development of, and create sustainable employment for the most disadvantaged people, groups and communities. While it doesn’t necessarily address the root causes, employment can help break the cycles of homelessness and The Underground Collaborative is on a mission to create paid pathways to employment to break the cycles of homelessness.

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Our People

The Underground Collaborative’s Board is made up of the most brilliant minds without which the organisation wouldn’t be where it is today. Come meet The Underground family.

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We are very grateful to the range of organisations and people who donate to us that allow The Underground Collaborative to operate.

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The Underground Collaborative acknowledges the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the first inhabitants of the nation and the traditional custodians of the lands where we live, learn and work. We pay our respects to ancestors and Elders, past and present and are committed to a positive future for the Aboriginal community.

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