Yarrabilba Family and Community Place

Transcript

Narrator: Welcome to the Family and Community Place, a safe, vibrant hub focused on helping our community grow together, learn and thrive situated on the grounds of Yarrabilba state school. Our centre offers families a range of activities and services in a supportive environment that encourages togetherness and improves the wellbeing of children, families, and the broader community.

Andrew Resetti: Yarrabilba was identified as a priority area where families would potentially need some extra support and so building infrastructure or social infrastructure was seen as a really positive thing for families. So this family community place is an example of that social infrastructure or that support.

Oswin Fainga'a: The first thing is building the right culture in the space. Because to be able to build the social connections, there's gotta be a particular type of culture that you build. One that is safe, one that is respectful, and one that embraces all people for more different kinds.

Stephanie Moc: For a lot of families, this might be just the place that they need to really, you know, empower themselves.

Andrew Resetti: A lot of the issues that communities are facing are quite complex. They're not able to be solved by any one government department or any one agency. So if you can, help families reduce their social isolation by meeting each other and creating their own village, then they'll start to resolve a number of these issues for themselves.

Young woman 1: We are relocated from the Gold Coast, and I didn't have any friends or family up here, so I was quite a homebody and a shut in.

Young woman 2: It's impacted me very much in the sense that I actually can get out of the house and take my kids out and connect with other moms and let my kids play with other kids.

Elderly couple 1: We look after Rory three days a week, so, She doesn't want to be stuck at home with two old people, so this is a fantastic place to be able to bring it.

Elderly couple 2: This place provides the free environment for children to play and I think children as well parents feel relaxed in this welcoming environment.

Young woman 3: For me, it's so important because it's bringing families together. It's making the community actually a community.

Stephanie Moc: I think overall, it's not just an improvement in the self-confidence, but also health as well. They're engaging with the services that we had. So I think it's not only improving, you know, the parents' lives, but also the kids' lives as well.

Oswin Fainga'a: We've got many different services. We've got child health nurses that come through. We've got immunisations, breakfast club, we've got playgroups that they operate through here as well. We've got social workers in this base. We've got a community nutritionist. We've got Onwards and Upwards program, which is a capacity building program.

Andrew Resetti: So I think on average at the moment, we're seeing, between 1500 and 2000 families come through the door each month.

Oswin Fainga'a: The thing that excites me, I guess, the most is within the first three months, we had only one particular group coming in, but now we're witnessing a good representation of community accessing this place.

Elderly couple 2: We get to know culture here too as we migrated here. We speak our own mother language at home so out child learns a lot from here.

Young woman 1: It's welcoming, it's safe, it's enjoyable. The environment's fantastic.

Elderly couple 1: The staff here have just been incredible from day one.

Young woman 1: It's just made a massive, massive improvement. We're all happier.

Stephanie Moc: Seeing that confidence grow in a lot of these families. It has been phenomenal. Like you see people who have been so isolated, so anxious to even come here, and then to be able to just be themselves and know that they're valued and heard. I think that's a really positive effect on them.

Oswin Fainga'a: And across the community of people coming in, families coming in, loving it, being here, and then also contributing back into the space. How quick that has come about has been really positive.

Andrew Resetti: They're started to feel like they can do it themselves so that they've got a level of capacity or empowerment that comes from having more confidence and then having the right sort of people around at the right time to just give'em a bit of a nudge in different directions is, I think it's been powerful to see that happen with the families.