About

Bleeding Heart is many things - a great place to meet friends, a cafe, an art gallery, a retail outlet and a wireless internet hub.

However, when you visit us, in the historic School of Arts building at 166 Ann Street, you’ll notice that we are a business with a difference.

Sporting the motto, “Using our powers for good and not evil”, we pride ourselves on our operation as a “profit for purpose” organisation.

This means that every dollar YOU spend goes into funding charitable and community enterprise.

We encourage and support positive activism, societal and economic inclusion, education and self-supporting, ethical business practice.

Background

Bleeding Heart was born in 2008 and is an initiative of the Wise Foundation, which aims to empower disadvantaged and marginalised individuals and strengthen communities by providing business and creative opportunities. Some of these endeavours include Bleeding Heart Café and Gallery (formerly Footsteps Gallery), Bizness Babes (a program that helps single or “stay at home” mums develop their own businesses, Musgrave Farmer’s Market and Children in East Timor (through the international programme, Children On The Edge, www.childrenontheedge.org), which supports a children’s centre and playscheme, a safe and friendly place for young orphans and children affected by the troubles in East Timor.

Bleeding Heart functions as the epicentre of these activities by contributing space, training and funding.

We like to think of ourselves as a “social enterprise hub,” essentially giving people a place and an opportunity to start self-supporting businesses, exhibit emerging art and products and to participate in positive social activism.

In addition, we also financially support a number of external charitable organisations.

We also actively support the endeavours of established, ethical community businesses by actually selling their products- everything from our organic free-trade coffee to the “community trade” products in our store.

Why the name ‘Bleeding Heart’?

The expression ‘bleeding heart’ has long had negative connotations and has been used to disempower and belittle those who champion human rights and care about other people.

We are dedicated to assisting communities and marginalised people and are determined to reclaim ‘Bleeding Heart’ as positive terminology.

Join us in our mission to champion human rights and positive expression through art, activism, ethical consumerism and education… with maybe a beer or cup of tea along the way.

“Right and wrong should come back into the language, I think, and better and worse, even good and bad. Call me old-fashioned, but that’s what I think. It’s time… I’ve lately thought of issuing a T-shirt, and it reads: 

’I think it’s wrong to kill people; I think it’s wrong to torture people, and wrong to hurt children. That’s what I think. I’m a bleeding heart. How about you?’ ” - Bob Ellis