A Day in Ballarat: Community Support in Action

There is something different about a day spent in regional Victoria.  

WAM coordinators headed to Ballarat recently to continue strengthening our connection with the community, reflecting afterwards on how local services are working together on the front line, often in a climate of limited resources. 

At the local Neighbourhood Centre, we saw that collaboration in real time. A program supporting parents into education and employment was running alongside a health and wellbeing group for women. Later, at Headspace Ballarat, Youthlaw lawyers work alongside youth workers and health professionals creating an integrated health justice pathway. In conversations with Court Support Service workers, and with a local family violence service, the same theme kept coming up - services working together. 

As Audre Lorde put it, "There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives."  

That's exactly what we saw in Ballarat - organisations meeting people where they're at, targeting early intervention and prevention while still responding to crisis, and collaborating to create ease of service access and navigation. This collaborative model creates sustained change, even when that change can be difficult to capture in data because people's lives don't fit neatly into boxes.  

Meeting with one of our Ballarat mentors that day further demonstrated the care this community has for one another. That conversation ultimately led to a generous donation from her workplace, Nevett's Lawyers as Trustees for the ED Black Charitable Trust to our Ann Polis Empowerment Fund (APEF). A greatly appreciated gift that considerably increased the resources available to support our participants, going towards multifaceted support opportunities including education, health, wellbeing, and sustaining housing. 

Previously the fund helped one local participant purchase a tablet so she could continue making digital art, connecting her to her culture and giving her the opportunity to print, display, and potentially sell her creative work. The care for this community is evident in Ballarat, and connections like these are what regional partnerships are built on. WAM is grateful to be part of it.