It’s the second year Mudgee’s Heath Gay will be taking to the streets to raise awareness through his BeKind movement, and this year his journey is bound for the capital.
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Last year Gay walked from Newcastle to Sydney over a week before living with the city’s homeless people for a month.
Now he’s expanding the March march further, including a web-series with Rose Tattoo’s Angry Anderson and a partnership with Logan Wines.
“I’m not too worried about sleeping rough this time around, I even [slept rough] in Melbourne last weekend ,” Gay said. “That bit is the easy part now, it’s more about how difficult it can be to find contacts and support.”
“One of the major parts of my plan this time around is to find people between Newcastle and Canberra that want to get involved in selling stickers and shirts – last time I was immersed in the culture I found so many of them felt ashamed to simply beg for money and help, but when they are offering things back for the assistance they are okay with it.”
As well as the addition of the Sydney to Canberra leg of the journey, Gay will be filming his journey for Anderson’s yet-to-be-released web series.
“It’s about getting all of the industry onboard, and getting the tattoo TV show that approached me involved will be a great step,” he said.
“I don’t really want to be famous, it’s not about that at all, but I know this is apart of getting it all out there.”
Although most of the journey is involved around east coast cities in New South Wales, Gay is always looking for ways to get his home town involved in his movements.
“I gravitated towards getting Mudgee wines involved because it’s a renewable thing that the town produces,” he explained.
“It’s great to get your home town behind what you’re doing, I’ve even had Hugh Bateman message me and tell me that he’s behind what I’m doing and he’s interested in helping out, so to have big names from home offering support is so great.”
The partnership with Logan Wines, which was recently awarded a 5-star rating in the the 2018 James Halliday Wine Companion, was a “no-brainer” for the Inkd Devotion founder.
“There’s no downsides – the winery helps out in my mission for the homeless and in turn people in Newcastle and Sydney hear about these wine producers helping out and it promotes Mudgee,” he said.
“It’s a win across every board, and people ask me how I get everything to work so well and I think that’s the trick, it’s just meant to work out like this.”
After his March march from Newcastle to the capital, Heath Gay will also be promoting more of the support of the homeless through the selling of Inkd Movement stickers and t-shirts, and he will be aiming to expand the company so that he can employ more people looking for work.
“I want it to become a cycle where there’s homeless people selling these things and so they’re making money and being able to get food and live properly,” he explained. “That means I can employ more homeless people to be in the back end of production and pressing shirts and things like that.
“It’s all connected in that I speak to all these people on my walk in March and then they come together and help the homeless and bring the tattoo industry into this positive light. It’s just positive thing after positive thing that all feeds off supporting each other in these groups and communities.”
If you want to find out more about the Be Kind project, or Inkd Movement, head to Heath’s website to read his on-street blog or get more information about the plights of the homeless: inkdevotion.com.