CREATING RESILIENT KIDS AT WORKERS

Workers Lifestyle Group recognises that generational change is key to the future success of our community. We have invested to build resilience in our local kids as part of a sustained, long term effort by Workers Lifestyle Group to help our next generation manage the challenges that they may face with greater skills and confidence. By working to break the cycle of poverty and disadvantage that leads to issues with education and employment pathways.

Sudanese and South Sudanese school children who come from financially disadvantaged families. The lunch boxes will be provided to these children five days a week during the school term.

• Warrakirri College – multi-year funding of over $5,000 for their lunch program that supplies a nutritious lunch for students, many of whom come from socially disadvantaged background and need support through their learning.

• Youth Insearch – $9,956 for a program that provides 20 places for Blacktown at-risk young people (aged 14 to 20) in their Weekend Workshops. This starts their journey to overcome their mental health and social changes.

• Youth Sport – Workers Lifestyle Group supports children development through access to sports, in particular team sports (including soccer/football, baseball, rugby league) with over $1 million per year in funding and other support, including access to purpose built $30 million infrastructure.

The community partners that we have joined forces with through funding and fundraising include:

• Clontarf Foundation “helping young Aboriginal & Torres Straight Islanders men to attend school, finish Year 12 and enter employment” – a multi-year partnership, providing cash and in-kind support through employment assistance.

• Grace’s Place – over $200,000 raised over many years to help build a centre for children impacted by homicide and in honour of the late Anita Cobby and her mother, Grace. This centre has recently opened and commenced operations.

• BYSA – over $135,000 through multi-year ongoing partnership to assist BYSA (Blacktown Youth Services Association) to help this over 30-yearold not-for-profit remain open and continue to assist disadvantaged youths with the aim of breaking generational homelessness, poverty, and incarceration.

• Vardys Road Public School – $2,000 granted to supply and install laundry facilities to help the school provide change to underprivileged students who come to school in dirty uniforms due to their circumstances at home. Laundering their clothes helps them fit in and concentrate at school, while they can also send them home with a clean uniform.

• Kor-Hajer Youth Development Organisation – $8,000 granted for the School Lunch Box program which is staffed by volunteers to create lunch boxes full of nutritional food that is culturally acceptable to

• Blacktown North Public School (Learning Links Resilient Kids program) – $43,485 has been donated in 2022 to this very special program. Learning Links specialist childhood educators and psychologists are adopting a whole-community response to ensuring children from Blacktown North Public School who are at risk from or who have experienced trauma through Domestic Violence are supported through targeted child-centric and community interventions that will help them now and into the future.

This is about creating a ‘whole of community” approach.

It has grown organically from our involvement with youth sport, and ranging from the creation of the H.E Laybutt Sporting Reserve (a $30 million development) through to the donation of funds in 2022 to purchase laundry facilities at Vardys Road Public School.

Our approach is partnership based to extend over multiple years. We recognise that intergenerational change requires many years of time and support, and we work with organisations to offer that multiyear support, Workers Lifestyle Group are partners that are committed in creating sustainable change.

We are in an area that has a very diverse community – age, ethnicity, religious beliefs – there are more than 180 nationalities in Blacktown LGA. It is a fact that many of these CALD nationalities have been impacted by disadvantage and fall into a low socioeconomic bracket, making it difficult for their children to access education and employment pathways.

It is important to Workers Lifestyle Group to improve

It is important to Workers Lifestyle Group to improve the lives of the Blacktown community through assistance to children and youth and to work with various community partners to bring out intergenerational change. The aim of this change is to then break the cycle of poverty and disadvantage, which in turn improves the lives of people in our community and our members.

Support of children and youth often converges with other important aims of Workers Lifestyle Group, including bringing awareness to and helping to break the cycle of Domestic & Family Violence, which is a major issue in the Blacktown LGA.

Further to that, these programs have achieved the following:

• Giving children access to positive role models.

• Taught basic life skills and employment pathway.

• Access to food or other necessities through laundry facilities

• Access to counselling, therapy and other programs.

• Using sports as a community benefit for health and wellbeing.