ABSTRACT
This chapter considers The Secular Pilgrimage and South Melbourne Commons, Melbourne, two projects of the Father Bob Foundation in Melbourne, Victoria. Both projects focussed on recognizing the importance of the connections made by people to other people and their surroundings. The former gathers the stories of historical connections and reveals them as a series of recollections through GPS-enabled smartphones to ‘pilgrims’ who make a commitment of time and effort to pay homage to these human stories and in doing so create a new understanding of the place. The latter is a community hub that adaptively reused a former school and grounds to facilitate a wide range of complementary opportunities and allowed people to connect across boundaries of class or background. The Pilgrimage project remains unrealized and the Commons no longer exists in its envisaged form. However both projects offer valuable experiences about resourcing and the vulnerability of these types of projects to changes in the underlying priorities of the organization(s) of which it is a part.
