The last edition of Edinburgh Soup, the live crowd-funding music night, took place last month at Assembly Roxy. The night has raised £10,000 for local community projects over three years, and bowed out fittingly by giving one final cash pot to Raised Voices, a charity providing creative writing and performance workshops for the homeless of Edinburgh, to help towards their Edinburgh Fringe show, No Home Like This Place. The charity’s founder, Blair Christie explained a bit more…

Raised Voices has been running for five years, although this is only our second fringe show following on from our successful run last year, with a show called Home.

The show is set in a care home and follows the different characters who live and work there. It is an original piece that was jointly written by the cast, who have all experienced homelessness and/or mental health issues and is packed full of humour, pathos and heart warming relationships that will make you think about what the word community really means.

The charity started off by just offering creative writing classes, but as we have grown and become more well known, we have developed in to a charity that runs regular drama groups that put on shows for the public with aim of raising money that we can donate to other charities.

So far we have donated money to a charity that supports parents that have lost a child in infancy, provided essential kits for rough sleepers via a charity called Streetwork plus many more. For our show at this year’s Fringe we will be donating half of our profits to a charity called Tailor Ed that works with autistic children. It’s a great thing for our members to be able to give to society in such a way, whilst all the time raising awareness of what people that can often be marginalised in society have to offer. Going forward the dream is to have a permanent base for the charity where we can spread our wings even further and grow our membership and what services we offer. That’s all to come, for now we have the small matter of a Fringe show to put on!

No Home Like This Place is @ Just The Tonic @ Grassmarket Community Project (Foundry Room), Fri 3 – Fri 17 Aug (not Suns and Mons) @ 4.50pm