The Mooroopna community benefits from site partners collaboration during Children’s Week.

While families were having fun participating in the Children’s Week activities, they were also building important connections with other families, local organisations and service providers

Our Place Mooroopna have been focused on developing connections, relationship building, and undertaking consultations, with both local services providers and the local community. These factors are crucial to the implementation of the Our Place approach.  

Each year, Greater Shepparton City Council facilitate and host activities and events during Children’s Week. Through knowledge gained from Our Place community and agency consultations, site partners were aware that opportunities for community members, local organisations and service providers to connect with each other was a priority.  

The combination of council’s regular facilitation and promotion of Children’s Week coupled with this sitewide priority, led to site partners identifying an opportunity to utilise Children’s Week as one way to begin to address this priority. Acting as the role of the glue, Our Place worked with site partners to plan activities and events. 

Each site partner arranged for themselves to either facilitate an activity or organise activities to be led by local organisations. All activities were aimed at providing the community with opportunities to familiarise themselves with the site, meet on site and external organisations, showcase student’s skills and get to know the Our Place Team. 

Unfortunately, due to COVID restrictions, the activities and events were unable to take place on site and in person as originally planned. However, all was not lost. Our Place and the site partners remained committed to providing these opportunities to the community and where possible moved them online. 

The school band, instead of playing live to the community were instead recorded and had their video uploaded to the Greater Shepparton City Council Facebook page for all to see. The Early Learning Centre, through their own Facebook Page, conducted online cooking classes, storytime, and a yoga session. 

Our Place liaised with Ambulance Victoria, who during consultations expressed their eagerness to engage in community engagement and education opportunities, to host an online short CPR education session. This session included question and answer time and was followed up with sharing of a recording where a paramedic and her son conducted a walk-through of an ambulance whilst answering FAQ’s.  

To ensure the community has on going access to the Ambulance Victoria session, Greater Shepparton City Council have shared it on their social media page. Ambulance Victoria also provided resources for distribution to the community including child friendly printable activities. 

Another activity that Our Place had planned was a session around child car seat safety. This session due to its delivery was not able to move online, however will occur, in person during playgroup, in the new year. Our Place, again though the focus of relationship building and acting as the glue, has also connected with a local service that is able to assist families who from this session identify that their child car seat is not to standard, to then receive a replacement. 

Implementation of the five Our Place evidence-based elements follows the following six-step cycle, which is all underpinned by a set of guiding principles:  

  1. Build relationships and establish a shared commitment  
  2. Understand the community and evidence the need  
  3. Develop a shared vision and plan to drive change in the community  
  4. Support ’joined-up’ service implementation  
  5. Provide ongoing implementation support  
  6. Undertake a detailed review process after three years of implementation