HOWARD Government minister Mal Brough was in Sunshine last week to help promote a $3-million federal initiative aimed at improving the lives of young disadvantaged children in Brimbank.
In a whirlwind Sunshine stopover last Tuesday, the Minister for Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs toured the UnitingCare Sunshine Mission before attending a graduation ceremony for newly trained migrant childcare workers around Brimbank.
The program, part of the $3-million federally-funded Better Communities for Children initiative, trained more than 20 mostly Sudanese women, giving them the opportunity to become childcare workers in the local Sunshine community.
Brimbank Better Communities for Children was launched in 2005, and includes up to 17 individual community projects – one of which is the childcare training plan – aimed at building education, literacy, and childhood support networks for children aged up to five.
The Smith Family and ISIS Primary Care are responsible for administering the program, which covers the suburbs of Sunshine, Sunshine West, Sunshine North, Albion and Ardeer.
Money is then provided to community organisations to administer the 17 individual programs under what is, in effect, a subcontracting arrangement.
Eleven community organisations in Brimbank, including St Vincent de Paul Society, UnitingCare, and the Migrant Resource Centre North West, are responsible for administering the 17 programs.
Project manager Margaret Rutherford, from the Smith Family, said this funding allowed early-childhood development decisions and programs to be tackled at a community level, instead of at a state or federal level.
“The idea is to spread the delivery out the people with the expertise and the agencies that have and have the connections and contacts with the community directly,” Ms Rutherford said last week.
She said that after two years, the program had helped developed literacy and language skills in young children, and that the results were very encouraging.
Speaking after the graduation ceremony last Tuesday, Mr Brough reinforced the importance that basic English skills had in helping out the young and disadvantaged.
“If they’re going to have a good start in life they’ve obviously got to be able to access what services governments of all levels provide,” he said
“If you can’t speak English, if you don’t know where to get that (service), then your children are going to suffer as a result,” he said.
Mr Brough also said he hoped that funding for the 17 initiatives in Brimbank – one of the 45 disadvantaged communities to receive funding under the Communities for Children program – would be continued after the program’s end, expected in 2009.
