Bixbus Welcome Centre

Founding and Early Years

The Bixbus Welcome Centre emerged from a gap that became increasingly apparent as the settlement grew. Bixbus, founded in July 2018 by Luke Smith, had expanded rapidly from isolated desert outpost toward thriving city, but this growth outpaced the development of support systems for newcomers. Construction, infrastructure, and trade flourished; structured assistance for settlers navigating their new environment did not. Many arrivals struggled to find housing, secure employment, or integrate into a community still defining itself.

Sergio Aveskamp and Lisa Kendrick recognised this gap independently before recognising each other. Sergio, a logistics coordinator who had relocated from Los Angeles in early 2019, brought hospitality and event planning expertise honed in Earth's competitive entertainment industry. Lisa, sister to Bixbus founder Luke Smith, had arrived in Clivilius after leaving behind her first husband and a successful career in Salt Lake City. Both understood displacement intimately; both channelled that understanding into action.

Their collaboration began informally through Lisa's Bixbus Event Collective, which she had founded in 2020 to foster social connection through community gatherings. Sergio's organisational skills complemented Lisa's community-building vision, and their conversations increasingly turned toward the structural support newcomers needed before they could benefit from social events. By early 2021, these conversations had crystallised into a proposal for something more systematic: a dedicated centre offering comprehensive transition assistance.

The Welcome Centre officially opened in March 2021, operating from a small repurposed warehouse near the settlement's main plaza. The facilities were modest—a few desks, some filing systems, a waiting area with mismatched chairs—but the mission was clear: ensure that every new arrival had access to the guidance, resources, and human connection necessary to build a life in Clivilius.

Services and Programmes

The Centre's services have expanded significantly since its founding, evolving in response to community needs and the growing complexity of settlement life.

Housing Assistance

Housing assistance was the Centre's first and most pressing priority. The Bixbus Tent Community, established within months of the settlement's 2018 founding, had been intended as a temporary solution to the housing shortage. By 2021, it had expanded multiple times, accommodating thousands of people awaiting permanent placement. The residential towers under construction—The Arlington, The Alexus, and subsequent developments—couldn't keep pace with arrivals, particularly as refugees from failed settlements elsewhere in the region swelled the population.

The Welcome Centre works closely with the Bixbus Housing Authority to manage this ongoing challenge. Centre staff assist newcomers with housing applications, advocate for families with particular needs, help residents understand allocation processes, and manage expectations when demand exceeds supply. They also provide practical support for the Tent Community's residents: orientation to available facilities, connection to services, and the human presence that makes bureaucratic waiting bearable.

Employment Placement

Many settlers arrive in Bixbus with valuable skills but little understanding of where to apply them. The Centre maintains connections with guilds across the settlement's growing industries—construction, agriculture, logistics, healthcare, administration—and matches newcomers with opportunities suited to their backgrounds and capabilities.

Guild placement involves more than job listings. Centre staff help settlers translate Earth-based qualifications into Clivilius contexts, identify transferable skills, and navigate workplace expectations that may differ from their previous experiences. They provide practical preparation: interview guidance, workplace culture orientation, and ongoing support during the critical early months of new employment.

Cultural Orientation

Bixbus draws settlers from extraordinarily diverse backgrounds—different countries, different eras, different settlements within Clivilius itself. The Centre's cultural orientation programmes help newcomers understand their new environment whilst also helping the existing community appreciate the perspectives new arrivals bring.

Orientation sessions cover practical matters: how Bixbus governance works, where to access essential services, what community norms have developed, how to navigate the settlement's geography. But they also address the less tangible challenges of transition: processing the grief of leaving previous lives, building identity in unfamiliar contexts, finding meaning when familiar frameworks no longer apply.

Social Integration

The Centre's partnership with the Bixbus Event Collective, founded by Lisa Kendrick a year before the Welcome Centre's establishment, ensures that newcomers have pathways into community life beyond bureaucratic assistance. Cultural exchange nights, communal meals, and celebratory gatherings provide spaces where strangers become neighbours, where shared experience bridges diverse backgrounds.

This social dimension reflects the founders' understanding that practical support, whilst necessary, isn't sufficient. People need housing and employment; they also need belonging. The Centre's approach integrates both, recognising that successful transition requires attending to emotional and relational needs alongside material ones.

Refugee Resettlement

The Centre's refugee resettlement programme has become one of its most significant functions. With many Guardians no longer operational, numerous settlements across the region have collapsed, leaving populations displaced and seeking refuge elsewhere. Bixbus leadership has actively encouraged these migrations, positioning the city as a place of sanctuary, but the resulting influx creates specific challenges that general settlement services cannot adequately address.

Refugees from failed settlements carry compounded trauma—they have lost not just homes but entire communities, often after already having made the impossible transition from Earth to Clivilius. They arrive with nothing but the hope that this settlement might prove more durable than the last. The Welcome Centre's refugee programme provides specialised support: expedited housing assistance, trauma-informed case management, family reunification services, and the patient accompaniment that helps people rebuild when rebuilding feels impossible.

Rebecca Baker, who joined the Centre in its founding year, leads this programme as senior caseworker. Her own experience—arriving in Clivilius as a young returned missionary whose university plans had been abandoned, navigating displacement whilst her family fractured across dimensional lines—informs her work with refugees. She understands that displacement accumulates, that each loss echoes previous losses, that helping requires presence as much as procedure.

Leadership and Staff

Sergio Miguel Aveskamp (Co-Founder and Director)

Sergio Aveskamp brings to the Welcome Centre the organisational precision and interpersonal warmth developed through years in hospitality and event planning. Born in 1991 in Los Angeles, he had worked across the entertainment industry before relocating to Bixbus in early 2019, seeking something he couldn't quite name until he found it.

His approach to the Centre reflects his background: he understands that arrival is, in some sense, performance art, requiring both warmth and precision to execute well. The structured orientation programmes he developed offer settlers step-by-step guidance through their transition, whilst his emphasis on efficiency ensures that bureaucratic processes don't become barriers to the human connection the Centre exists to provide.

Sergio's personal life has also found anchor in Bixbus. In 2021, he began a relationship with Damien Russo, a medic; in 2023, they adopted their daughter, Isla. The restless wanderer who once fled routine has found purpose in crafting it for others, his gift for bringing order to chaos now serving those navigating their own crossroads.

Lisa Victoria Kendrick-Smith (Co-Founder and Community Director)

Lisa Kendrick brings to the Welcome Centre the particular insight of someone who understands profound loss and deliberate rebuilding. Born in 1994 in Adelaide, she had established a successful event planning career in Salt Lake City before leaving behind her first husband to follow her family to Clivilius—a decision that cost her everything familiar whilst opening possibilities she couldn't have imagined.

Her gift lies in recognising that newcomers need what she herself once desperately sought: someone who understands that arrival is only the beginning of truly coming home. The Event Collective she founded in 2020 created spaces for celebration and connection; the Welcome Centre she co-founded extends that vision into practical support, ensuring that settlers receive both bread and roses, both shelter and song.

Lisa married Thomas Kendrick, a native Clivilian, in 2022, and they are raising two children together. Her family connections within Bixbus—her brother Charles is married to Chloe Smith, whose sister Rebecca works at the Centre—have created a network of relationships that strengthen both her personal and professional life.

Rebecca Anne Baker (Senior Caseworker, Refugee Resettlement)

Rebecca Baker joined the Welcome Centre in 2021, recruited by Lisa Kendrick who had observed her informal welfare work during the preceding two years. Rebecca had arrived in Clivilius in early 2019, a returned missionary whose planned social work degree had been abandoned when her family relocated. The Centre offered structure for skills she had been exercising ad hoc, institutional form for a calling that had lost its framework.

Her specialisation in refugee resettlement emerged from her particular gifts and experiences. Her mission to the Philippines had prepared her to connect across cultural difference; her own displacement had taught her that transition accumulates, that each loss echoes previous losses. She brings to refugee cases not just professional competence but personal understanding—the knowledge of what it means to rebuild when everything familiar has been stripped away.

The family connection between Rebecca and Lisa adds dimension to their professional relationship. Lisa is married to Thomas Kendrick; Lisa's brother Charles is married to Rebecca's sister Chloe. They are not close friends—their temperaments and circumstances differ—but they are effective colleagues who respect each other's contributions, two women whose paths converged through family ties and shared commitment to the work.

Facilities and Location

Original Location (2021–2023)

The Welcome Centre began operations in a modest repurposed warehouse near Bixbus's main plaza. The facilities were functional rather than impressive: office space carved from industrial architecture, waiting areas furnished with whatever could be salvaged, meeting rooms that doubled as storage when not in use. But the location was central and accessible, and the modest surroundings may have helped newcomers feel that they were receiving genuine assistance rather than bureaucratic processing.

Unity Plaza (2023–Present)

In 2023, the Welcome Centre relocated to permanent facilities within Unity Plaza's South Commercial Wing. The move marked a significant milestone in the Centre's development and in Bixbus's recognition of its importance.

The new location provides dedicated offices for staff, a resource centre where settlers can access information and complete paperwork, and communal gathering spaces where newcomers can connect with each other and with established community members. The facilities are professional without being intimidating, designed to communicate both competence and welcome.

The Unity Plaza location also positions the Centre at the heart of Bixbus's administrative and cultural centre. Newcomers processing through the Centre glimpse the settlement's aspirations—the commerce, the connectivity, the evidence of a community building something lasting. The location itself becomes part of the orientation, demonstrating what Bixbus offers to those willing to contribute to its ongoing development.

Partnerships and Collaborations

The Welcome Centre's effectiveness depends significantly on its relationships with other Bixbus institutions.

Bixbus Event Collective

The partnership with the Event Collective, founded by Lisa Kendrick in 2020, predates the Welcome Centre itself. The two organisations share leadership, vision, and the understanding that practical support and social integration must work together. Where the Centre provides bureaucratic assistance, the Collective provides community; where the Centre processes paperwork, the Collective hosts gatherings. Together, they ensure that newcomers receive comprehensive support for both material and relational needs.

Bixbus Housing Authority

The BHA, founded in 2019, manages the settlement's housing allocation systems, including oversight of the Tent Community and placement in residential developments. The Welcome Centre works closely with the Authority on housing assistance, providing the human interface that helps newcomers navigate bureaucratic processes. Where housing allocation might feel impersonal, the Centre's involvement transforms it into something more supportive—the Authority's administrative necessity tempered by the Centre's relational warmth.

Bixbus Civic Welfare

Bixbus Civic Welfare, formally established as a department in 2022, handles longer-term welfare needs: child protection, family services, trauma support, and reintegration programmes. The relationship between the Welcome Centre and Civic Welfare functions as a careful relay—newcomers first finding shelter and employment through the Centre's initial support, then passing into Welfare's steadier hands for the deeper work of healing trauma and rebuilding fractured lives. The Centre catches people as they arrive; Welfare holds them whilst they learn to stand.

Impact and Recognition

By 2025, the Bixbus Welcome Centre had processed tens of thousands of new arrivals, each representing a life in transition, a story of displacement and hope. The Centre's impact defies simple quantification—it exists in housing secured, employment found, but also in loneliness alleviated, belonging discovered, futures made possible.

The refugee resettlement programme has become particularly significant as settlement failures elsewhere in Clivilius have accelerated. The Centre's expertise in trauma-informed case management, family reunification, and long-term support has positioned it as a model for similar services across the region. Staff regularly consult with emerging settlements seeking to develop their own welcome infrastructure.

The Centre's founders have been recognised for their contributions to Bixbus's development, though both Sergio and Lisa deflect such recognition toward their staff and the community that makes the work possible. The Welcome Centre, they maintain, succeeds not because of exceptional leadership but because of shared commitment—the understanding, embedded in Bixbus's culture, that a settlement's strength lies in how it welcomes strangers home.