RENT PARTY AUDIENCE TAKE TO THE DANCEFLOOR

YOU DID IT! YOU HAVE HELPED FUND THE PLANNED SOUNDPROOFING OF HARES & HYENAS, WHICH WE HOPE TO HAVE STARTED BY 8 DECEMBER. THANK YOU TO EACH AND EVERY SUPPORTER, WHETHER THEY WERE ABLE TO DONATE MONEY OR HELP SPREAD THE WORD OF THIS CAMPAIGN.

WE ARE OVERWHELMED BY YOUR SUPPORT. THANK YOU.

ANYTHING ABOVE THE TARGET AMOUNT IS GOING TO BE USED TO BUY A HIGH QUALITY RADIO HEAD MICROPHONE SYSTEM FOR THE VENUE SO THAT WHEELCHAIR-USING PERFORMERS WILL FINALLY HAVE THE BEST USE OF THE HOUSE SOUND SYSTEM.

All the best,
Rowland Thomson, Crusader Hillis and Stefanie Petrik

Creativity is Important to Melbourne
Hares & Hyenas has been Melbourne's queer and alternative bookshop for the past 23 years. With book sales going down worldwide, we decided the create the Hare Hole - at night our bookshop morphs into a licensed performance space for 80 and over the past few years we have been presenting some of the best talent in town.  However, we have a City of Yarra/VCAT ruling that says we have to soundproof the eastern wall before we can go later and have louder live music and parties on here. To a large extent our future depends on this soundproofing as it will allow us to program much more diverse performance here.


RESIDENT QUIPPINGS BAND, THE BEARBRASS ASYLUM ORCHESTRA, TAKE A BACK SEAT WHILE COMEDIAN AND DJ JARROD MARRINON TAKES CENTRE STAGE

Community Hub and Open House
Hares & Hyenas is the closest Melbourne has to a queer community centre. It offers free space to a range of community groups here for meetings and gatherings, including being a regular space for Butch Femme Trans Melbourne, Stitch and Bitch, Lesbian Open House, Vic Leather, book clubs, Quippings and other groups of queer people with disability and mental health issues. Over the past two decades we have donated over 2000 book vouchers to groups and organisations, housed Melbourne Queer Film Festival for several years and made sizeable donations to a range of causes. Our donations alone adds to tens of thousands of dollars.


RENT PARTY: MELBOURNE'S WONDERFUL BAND, THE STAIN, COMPLETE WITH MARCHING GIRLS

A Creative Engine
Since 1992 we have presented several hundred events and thousands of writers, performers and artists. Ever since opening our doors we have encouraged people to perform here whether they are reading their fiction for the first time in public or we are inviting artists and writers of international stature to share our space and invite you in to experience it. Never an enterprise to be pigeonholed, Hares & Hyenas continues to present writers and performers from across the spectrum - emerging to established, young and old, cisgendered and trans, queer, straight and undeclared. It has built strong relationships with the disabled, Deaf, Indigenous, polyamorous, multicultural and transgender communities in Melbourne. Artists are paid and we have the most respectful audiences in town. In the past few years we have developed the venue with excellent AV and theatre lighting, and the acoustics in the place are amazing. 


MIDSUMMA 2014: KATH DUNCAN INTERVIEWS CAROLYN D'CRUZ, GRACE LEE AND DENNIS ALTMAN IN BEYOND ACRONYMS

A Boutique Venue with a Hearing Issue (Turn Up the Volume)
Hares & Hyenas needs to raise the money to soundproof the venue. After two decades of a mutually supportive relationship with our customers, performers and the wider community we are asking you to help make a newly soundproofed venue a reality. The rewards of the project are for all of us, but we have also pulled together a bunch of amazing rewards in this campaign for supporting us.

Some of Our Campaign Supporters

Supporting Groups and Organisations

The funds will be used soundproof the ground and first floor of the eastern wall, which involves building two new walls on each level. Our affected neighbour is sharing the costs of the project with us. 
An estimated breakdown of our costs (half the total budget) is:
$4000 for materials - new walls, acoustic insulation, treated soundboards etc.
$8500 for labour, estimated to take up to ten days in staged works and involves changes to the existing layout of the premises.

If we exceed our campaign target we will use the additional funds to:
An additional $1000 will allow us to buy a high-quality radio headphone microphone system so that wheelchair-using artists will not have to rely on hired equipment or inappropriate microphones.
A further $3000 will allow us to change our shop house lights to LED, saving us significant money and greatly reducing our carbon footprint.
A further $6000 (dreaming very big) will allow us to install solar panels on our roof, significantly reducing both our power costs and carbon footprint.

There will still be a problem of sound transference following the work:
We have researched similar projects and our chosen builder has worked on several soundproofing jobs in the past. Everything tells us that we are going about it the right way; and our VCAT ruling only stipulates that the work has to be done to specifications provided by City of Yarra.

Closing the shop during the work will exacerbate financial issues:
This is likely and we are hoping that through the Pozible campaign we will be able to increase current awareness of the shop and the challenges it faces in the current retail and publishing environment.