Brighton Council in partnership with Australian Red Cross Tasma­nia and JRLF Senior School has introduced Community Creators to high school students at JRLF.

The program is part of a pilot program developed by Brighton Council’s Community Develop­ment Officer, Kylie Murphy and Australian Red Cross place-based community development worker, Joselle Griffin.

Community Creators focuses on empowering young people to be­come responsible, empathetic, and active members of their commu­nities. Through working together once a week, the group aims to instill a sense of civic duty, social awareness, and to support young people to become positive change agents in their community. It is about creating an environment for young people to voice their opinions and identify opportuni­ties to work with others in their community.

During normal school hours, kids are given the space to discuss ideas and learn new skills such as public speaking, community team build­ing and what it means to be a good community member or community mentor.

The group is learning key Commu­nity Development principles with input from the Australian Curric­ulum. The program blends ABCD (Asset Based Community Devel­opment), co-design, kitchen table conversations and change making community-led principles, to name just a few. The skills learnt and discussions that take place are de­pendent on where the group wants to take it and in a language they understand and relate to.

Community Creators successfully links with trauma informed practices to create a positive learning environment for every­one. The program is now quite a few weeks in and the feedback has been extremely positive from both the young people and teachers in­volved. Kylie Murphy, Community Development Officer, Brighton Council shared, “We have a bunch of beautiful kids from a range of different year groups who have been coming along each week and inspiring us all with their level of empathy for each other and inter­est in learning what it means to be a “Community Creator”. So far it has been a positive experience for us all and we look forward to sharing how it is all going at the end of Term 1.”

“The hope and dream is that we can roll this program out to all the schools in our area, including the primary schools. We are so thank­ful that JRLF Senior School has allowed us into the lives of these young people during school time to pilot the program and we are very grateful for the time that Paul Mabb the cultural space co-ordina­tor at JRLF has given to support­ing us during these sessions,” Kylie said.