COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIPS INITIATIVE

HUME CITY COUNCIL Hume Winter Lights Festival

Answering the council’s call to build culturally vibrant and connected communities, the Hume Winter Lights Festival brought together visual art and performance in a public space to build community connections through art, music, and new experiences. 18 months of close engagement with local artists, students, and community members culminated in over 4,000 locals and visitors alike converging on Broadmeadows for an engaging live event.

The free event in underutilised public space presented projection, live music, interactive installations, roving performers, and fireworks in a project that supported local artists and community members. Council simultaneously showcased and celebrated its creative community while fostering opportunities to improve practice capability and encouraged economic participation of creative practitioners. For example, through the adoption of a non-hierarchal collaborative working model, Hume and the Centre for Projection Art supported Hume’s Aboriginal community to tell their own stories in their own voices through the event.

Funding has been secured for future editions of the Hume Winter Lights Festival with plans to expand the celebration of Hume and its people to run over multiple nights to ensure the event remains sustainable.

SOUTH GIPPSLAND SHIRE COUNCIL Local Men Local Communities

Suicide is the tenth-leading cause of death among males in Australia. These rates are higher in rural Victoria, exacerbated by the difficulty in accessing mental health services regionally. A substantial uptick in deaths in South Gippsland in 2019 led to the Department of Health’s funding of the Local Men Local Communities project, aimed at addressing this issue through a community-based prevention approach. The program sought to build the capacity of local individuals, community groups, and workplaces to address the mental health and emotional wellbeing of men aged over 25 in the municipality, successfully creating a place-based approach to suicide prevention activities in regional Victoria.

Where men who do not engage readily with traditional community clubs and organisations being at particular risk of loneliness and its resulting poor mental health outcomes, this initiative sought to change these outcomes by recruiting a group of men with a specific interest in mental health to plan and lead non-traditional activities and events to help reduce this social isolation.

The support includes online and in-person training for the community and workplaces that helps participants respond to people with poor mental health, support for rural farmers, suicide prevention awareness, online resources, and events that are ongoing.

City Of Greater Geelong Youth On Board Program

The Youth on Board Program, operated by the City’s Youth Development Unit, is designed to give young people aged between 18 to 25 the skills to contribute to boards across our region.

This new and innovative program acknowledges the importance of young people having a voice in local organisation decision making and planning.

The aim of the program is to increase the participation of young people as full board members.

Participants are trained in governance and are placed on boards of management of local organisations.

The program also includes a structured mentoring component, whereby organisations nominate a board member to mentor young people in board meeting protocols.

The Youth Development Unit also provide on-going mentoring and support, as well as opportunities for reflective practice for both participants and organisations alike.

The Youth on Board Program aligns with the newly adopted Victorian Youth Strategy, and contributes to a unified approach to the youth sector between State and Local Governments.