Our work in the Bay and Basin is based on listening to the community and coming up with solutions together to address them. In 2020 there were so many obstacles put in everyone’s way making some things seem hard to reach, hard to achieve or just downright stressful. 

The community said they wanted to support children through adolescence by adding more tools to their toolkit, particularly during the restrictions affecting things like interschool visits, school camps and inability to visit schools.  Focused on the community goal of Education about healthy life choices and nurturing self esteem, the Firefly team put their heads together and built a series of workshops called Bloom Where you are Planted for delivery in term 4. The workshops, linked to research, were designed for tween girls to learn more about resilience, self esteem, wellbeing, kindness, gratitude, goal setting and mindfulness. Each theme was based around an activity that was open to be delivered by a skilled community member. Some of these activities were floristry, origami and exercise.   These workshops ran over seven weeks and were fully booked from day one – demonstrating community interest.

Participants joined from three of the bay and basin primary schools and all gained from the experience. They shared with us that they enjoyed “how to explain a problem”, “how to flower arrange and then give this as a gift of gratitude”,  “learning about other people”. The girls also shared they enjoyed “learning you cannot judge a book by its cover” and “that everyone has value not just you.” 

Firefly team, 2020

100% of our group said they would recommend this to someone else and 100% said they had fun.

Evaluation Survey, 2020

We really wanted to bring the community on the journey with us and we were so lucky to have Maddie from F45 Gym teach the girls in the wellness session how to use the exercise equipment at the paradise beach reserve so they have the confidence to do that at any time.

Listening to the group gave us more ideas on what the community children their age want. Suggestions such as team building exercises, learning to be openminded, how to deal with stress and learn not to bully. The girls thought it would be good to teach the other children around us to be kind and how to use art to learn.

These resilience workshops have inspired the project to really focus on addressing this need and researching into more possibilities in the Bay and Basin community. We really want to work with community members to share their skills during future workshops. If you are a community group or an individual that would like to get involved and share your time with our tweens to support them to thrive get in touch. For more information around the Firefly project or to get involved visit our website www.fireflybayandbasin.com follow our facebook page Firefly Bay and Basin or call Carolyn on 0468 600 574.

Having this fantastic afterschool activity that really instills independence is exactly what they needed at this time

Parent of participant, 2020

Firefly Bay and Basin is one of several pilot projects in NSW that have run since 2019. They explore ways for communities to work together to improve the lives of children, young people and families. These pilots are funded by the not-for-profit organisation Uniting. Uniting is responsible for social justice, community services and chaplaincy work of the Uniting Church in NSW and the ACT.