School: Collingwood Alternative School (an annex of Collingwood College) (VIC)
Partner: Brotherhood of St Laurence (BSL)
Collingwood Alternative School is an annex of a large inner urban secondary college in Melbourne. The school works with disadvantaged young people who have reached a crisis point in their education. Many have had disrupted home backgrounds, police involvement, diagnosed specific learning needs or involvement with drugs or alcohol. Students at risk are referred to the school through the Department of Human Services and welfare agencies and families or schools throughout the metropolitan area.
Early in 2008, the school formed a partnership with the Brotherhood of St Laurence. The Brotherhood, working with the Rotary Club of Melbourne, had obtained philanthropic funding to develop a project that would build the skills and motivation to enable disadvantaged young people to become leaders in their community.
The Community Service Leadership Program (CSLP) was developed as a result of a significant body of research. Social participation by young people in community life, such as volunteering, was found to be a key factor in engaging young people with employment, family and community and developing transferable work skills. The CSLP aimed to provide an opportunity for disadvantaged youth, often the receivers of service, to turn that experience around by actively engaging them in the development and implementation of positive solutions to community issues they themselves identified.
The Brotherhood engaged a project development officer to develop the idea in consultation with a partnership steering group. The project officer researched similar initiatives both in Australia and internationally to discover the model that would be most useful to the cohort of disadvantaged students that the partners wanted to engage. The model selected was Working Community – a curriculum based project that engages young people in designing their own community projects. This model has five phases, beginning with a student induction phase (phase 1) followed by visits to community organisations which the students help to organize and conduct themselves (phase 2). Phase 3 consists of workshops in which the students develop self-confidence, leadership, teamwork and communication skills. In phase 4, the students work in teams on community projects on a social issue which they have identified as important. The program finishes with project presentations and celebrations (phase 5).
Around 30 students took part in the CSLP. Five community projects were initiated, planned and implemented by the students. Students:
- organised and ran a multicultural picnic in a park, an anti-discrimination quiz and a basketball game
- organised a workshop on sexual health and self-defence for culturally and linguistically diverse women run by the Multicultural Centre for Women’s Health
- organised and ran an environment education workshop addressed to non-English speaking students, focusing on energy saving, waste reduction, recycling and water saving, including student presentation and practical activities
- prepared a young people’s gym schedule for the Collingwood Leisure Centre, based on a student-run survey of culturally and linguistically diverse students from a local TAFE
- designed and prepared an exhibition of artwork and interviews with the homeless elderly people who attend the Brotherhood of St Laurence Coolibah Day Centre
An evaluation conducted by the Brotherhood’s Research and Policy Centre gathered qualitative data from participants in the program through focus groups, interviews and observation.
The evaluation indicated that students had gained a better understanding of community issues, had increased empathy and engagement, a more positive outlook on their ability to make positive contributions to the community, improved communication skills and improved skills in teamwork, planning and organization. The evaluation will be used as a basis for planning the next stage in the project. The students have developed strong links with members who attend the Coolibah Centre, and are currently implementing a number of projects relevant to the Centre – furniture making, an art project and a workshop in which the students will teach the elderly members to use new technologies. The Impact Award funds will be important in supporting the further implementation of the CSLP; it is hoped to involve other educational institutions.
