Housing will never solve homelessness, but community will.
Aside from my biological offspring, I’ve got a couple of babies. Most of you will be familiar with Cinapse, the film website you’re currently reading, which I co-founded with David Delgado over 4 years ago.
But I’ve got another baby. And I’d like to share about it with you. The Community Cinema is a program I lead at the Community First! Village here in Austin, Texas. The Village, a project of Mobile Loaves & Fishes, is a 27 acre master planned community designed to lift the chronically homeless and disabled of Austin up off the streets and provide them long term housing.
It may not seem immediately apparent, then, why we have a beautiful outdoor amphitheater with a 500 person capacity, a permanent outdoor movie screen, and a gloriously retrofitted Airstream trailer kitted out with a professional grade projection system donated by the Alamo Drafthouse. But we do. And I get to host outdoor screenings in this space every Friday night under the Texas stars… usually with a campfire going. It’s a magical atmosphere, and believe it or not, it ties directly in with our vision of restoring community back into the lives of our formerly homeless residents and the greater city of Austin.
Each Friday night, we host these outdoor screenings free of charge and open them up to the public for anyone to come. It’s an amazing opportunity for Austinites to tour the Community First! Village, see what we’re doing in this space, and also enjoy a top notch event. Public movie nights also offer us an opportunity to hire our residents and provide them dignified income opportunities. Each movie night creates work for residents in the form of concessions sales, an audio/visual assistant, and more! We’re now also renting the amphitheater for private events and partnering with sponsors each month, all of which will further share the vision with partners and engage residents with dignified income opportunities.
So I want to invite you to come and experience not only a beautiful outdoor venue and great movies, but the remarkable Village we’re building, of which the Community Cinema is just one small part.
We’ve just released the lineup for June, and I wanted to link you to those screenings below. We program each month to a theme and June will be Oscar Month! All the films were nominated for one or more Oscars in 2016. You can come for free, or you can donate $5 per ticket when you click the images to RSVP online.
As a special bonus in June, we’ve partnered with Community Dreams to bring a couple of live music acts to play at some of our screenings. Be there June 9th to hear Tres (Latin Jazz) play before La La Land, or The Warren Hood Band (Country Western) play before Hell Or High Water. I’ll see you at the movies!
“Housing will never solve homelessness, but community will.” — Alan Graham, Founder & CEO, Mobile Loaves & Fishes
And I’m Out.