Supporting adults within the Morwell community
By playing the role of ‘The Glue’, Our Place Morwell has facilitated initiatives to support adults within the community.
Opportunities for adults in Morwell
After consulting with the Morwell community, Our Place identified that adults were seeking opportunities to engage in social activities and attend information sessions relevant to their circumstances. To help ensure that these needs are being met, Our Place continually partners with local organisations to facilitate applicable and relevant opportunities.
So far in 2022, the Our Place Morwell team have partnered with a range of organisations and services, resulting in several free initiatives and programs being offered on site. Some of these include:
- A free weekly adult craft group and women’s group
- Information sessions about adult education opportunities and employment support
- Workshops to assist people in accessing My Gov and school communication platforms
- Free sleep settling workshop
- Free help your child learn & thrive – Learning Games workshop
- Facilitating opportunities for local community members to take part in a ‘Community In Action’ site advisory group
- Facilitating access to a local GP, Paediatrician and Maternal Child Health Nurse on site
How do these opportunities benefit the community?
Attending activities and information sessions on site at the school is a familiar and comfortable space for many and is also a convenient location. Careful consideration is undertaken regarding the timings of sessions, which helps ensure that parents and carers do not have to go back and forth from home to attend, and the information session topics are also based on identified needs and desires within the community.
The weekly craft group has also resulted in many benefits for attendees. Using free materials and having access to sewing machines and other equipment has allowed participants to work on projects such as bag making, quilting and apron making over several weeks and have taken the end products home to use.
Having an Our Place community facilitator and a Gippsland Employment Skills and Training (GEST) team member attend the craft sessions has helped participants develop their sewing and craft skills further, with many learning new techniques and some participants learning to use a sewing machine for the first time. The group also provides opportunities for adults to connect socially, enabling friendships to develop and reducing social isolation. As pre-schoolers come along to the group with their parents and carers, children have also developed new friendships.
In term three, the craft group will support the on-site Early Learning Centre by hosting a ‘Sewing Bee’ to sew library bags for the children to use. This initiative will help participants learn another new skill whilst providing families with a free resource. The children from the Early Learning Centre will also visit the sewing group to observe the bags being made during the sewing bee.
Aligning with the Our Place Approach
This is one example of what we at our place refer to as ‘The Glue’ in action across multiple Our Place evidenced-based elements. ‘The Glue’, while not an element itself, is a critical factor in how the Our Place approach is implemented as it connects the five Our Place elements and enables the success of the approach.
For more information about The Our Place Approach, including our five evidenced-based elements Click Here
