Katherine Hibbert
Katherine Hibbert is the author of FREE: Adventures on the Margins of a Wasteful Society...
Katharine Hibbert is the author of FREE: Adventures on the Margins of a Wasteful Society (Ebury Press, 2010), the story of two years she spent living without money by squatting and scavenging. She is also the founder and CEO of Dot Dot Dot, a social enterprise which allows people who do brilliant voluntary work to live cheaply in homes that would otherwise be empty.
Katharine will be discussing Freedom Focus on the Idler Stage:
What happens when you walk away from everything you think you can’t live without? Seven years ago, Katharine Hibbert decided to find out. Leaving her job and her rented flat with a £20 note and only as much as she could carry in a backpack, she wanted to see if she could use society’s waste to survive without earning or spending money. She managed to build a life by squatting, finding good food thrown away by shops and cafes, and getting around by hitch-hiking and on a scavenged scrap-heap bike. Her book, FREE: Adventures on the Margins of a Wasteful Society, tells the story of the two years she spent getting by without money. Sometimes it was cold, lonely and scary, but once she found friends and learned some tricks and skills, she found that she was happy, and that she didn’t really want to go home.
But solving her own housing crisis and freeing up her own time by turning empty properties into squatted homes wasn’t enough. With half a million empty houses in the UK, she wanted to find ways to get more of them into good use, to set more people free from the need to constantly work to pay the rent, and perhaps allow them to do the things which are valuable to all of us but which don’t earn much money. So she set up Dot Dot Dot, a social enterprise which lets people who want to use their time to help others to live cheaply in homes that would otherwise be vacant. Dot Dot Dot now houses hundreds of people and supports them to give tens of thousands of hours of effort to good causes. Katharine, who was named UK young social entrepreneur of the year for 2014, will be talking about her journey through Britain’s empty buildings, and what it has taught her about waste, community and freedom.
http://www.dotdotdotproperty.com/about
