Author: samuelkwong

The group that has been tasked with the Men’s Shed as it’s initiative consists of three students from the Media program (myself, Michael and Matt) and two from the design (Chasmin and Rizki). Michael will act as our liaison and be the first point of contact between our group and Lentara, whether that be through Jeff or a person who manages The Men’s Shed group.

The unique quality about this initiative compared to the others is its direct impact towards the individual on an emotional level and mental well-being.

Ahead of our initial contact with Lentara, our group will need to decide how we make our approach. What questions do we ask?

Potential Questions:

• What is the ultimate goal of The Men’s Shed? (Keep people connected with society. Connect people with opportunities. Are they looking to increase involvement in the Men’s Shed?)
• What growth would they want to see in Men’s Shed? (Do you want more involvement? Increase activities.)
• What types of people go to The Men’s Shed? (Demographic.)
• How do people get involved? (Do you approach them?)
• What benefits have you seen from The Men’s Shed initiative? (Specific examples.)
• What can our group do for The Men’s Shed? (What we are capable of doing…Produce videos? Do they want a documentary format? Do they want 30sec-1min ad which summarises what The Men’s Shed is?)
• How can The Men’s Shed be supported? (Donations. Collaboration with other organisations/companies)

Understanding the ethics involved:
Remain open approach to what can be achieved (i.e. Seth had to gain trust of family before they were comfortable). Wait to be invited in.

Not for profit sector: Ethics is paramount

Liaising:
Jeff is first liaison. Wait for the go ahead from Seth. Discuss with managers. Refer back to Seth and Pete for big decisions.

What is a Return Brief:
A statement to the client. Sum up what’s been said and observed. Highlight key opportunities. Used by lawyers to clarify the objective. Document can be updated often.

Research:
Mood board – Examples. What do other people do

Current info about The Men’s Shed Initiative (From Lentara website):

Description:
The Men’s Shed creates an opportunity for men to participate in their local community, share their experiences, find companionship and grow in confidence and self-worth. The program provides men with information about community services and general support and referral.

The Men’s shed is a meeting place where men can talk, yarn, laugh and relax. The Men’s shed is also a place to learn new skills and participate in activities and gain access to men’s health and wellbeing information.

Address Details:
Sunshine Mission
A: 32 Withers Street, Sunshine Vic 3032
P: (03) 9311 5900
E: brimbankmensshed@lentarauc.org.au

Operating Hours:
Wednesday – 10am to 2pm (Social and Men’s Health and Wellbeing)
Friday – 9.30am to 12.30pm (Projects using tools)

Who can visit the Men’s Shed:
Men living in the city of Brimbank and surrounding suburbs
Men from diverse cultural, language and social back grounds
Men’s with mental health issues
Men who are unemployed or under-employed
Veterans
Those who are over 18 years old
Men who have retired from work

How to Access:
To access the men’s shed program you can either be referred by another individual or agency or simply drop into the sunshine mission and enquiry with one of our team members.

Activities:
Small community based projects using tools
Social outings
Sharing in fresh fruit and vegetables
Monthly exercise sessions
Healthily food preparation classes
Regular working groups
Learn Technology

For the Lentara Studio, our assessment will be to work on a current or potential initiative proposed by Lentara. Lentara may use our ideas and/or media artefacts depending on how useful and relevent the work we do is for them. It would be quite the achievement if they go on to use our work, but how well we work as a group, but especially how well we collaborate with Lentara and discover how we can be an invaluable benefit for them will go a long way towards success.

These are the initiatives:

Clothing Bins:
Found all over the place. Spend a lot of time cleaning up rubbish near clothing bins. Cardboards in corporate businesses. Can’t get more than 4 boxes due to health hazards. Multi storey apartments. Leave bins there and collect. Conceptual idea. Design a bin, find out restrictions, what space is available, how can it fit. Where do the clothes go, the process, someone buys a shirt, money goes to the program.

Shower Bus:
How do we do this? Is it going to work? It’s an idea, a bus fitted with showers. Drive to homeless areas and the homeless can have showers. Provide towels soap, etc.? Yarra Valley. How is it sustainable…provide bus to events i.e runs, triathlons, sporting events. Who needs access to showers? Find out how it is valuable? The prototype designs. Research the needs of people who need to have a shower both the homeless and sporting events. What else can be added? Food?

Men’s Shed:
A program that gives a man something to do. Participating in their local community. Maybe lost his job.
Profiling the program. Range of people. What are they getting out of the program. How can people help. Need corporate support. All males only.
Tell a story. The experience.
Communal Justice Project – Met people who have left prison. Rebuild their life.
Emergency relief. People lose their job and they reach out to Lentara who can assist in relief.
Financial Counselling – They are assisted in how they are going to survive.

Asylum Housing:
Crowd funding video. $20000 from one person (a judge). Housing as a safe haven. How do you provide a house? Where from? How to model? “Oh that’s how I can”

Make aware and then find out how they can help. From start to finish, what is needed? Is it bigger than donating a house? This is what it has done to the people! Starting point is to make people aware of the program.

Lentara Identity:
Proposed by one of the students. TBD

 

 

 

As summarised in the previous blog entry, the Media and Design programs will collaborate closely with Lentara to work on initiatives and help realise its potential. The following are notes taken from the presentation given by Jeff Jones from Lentara on Day 2 of the Studio:

Who:
Jeff Jones – Corporate Partnerships and Communications manager, Lentara
Experience in Digital communications platform, including AFL Community program.

Lentara in a sentence:
Create opportunities for children, families and individuals to flourish in a fair and generous community “mission in life”

For who:
They accept all people. Provide to all people irrespective of cultural background.

Why:
Non-for-profit have to provide support. Government doesn’t provide enough. Lentara are the largest providers of support.

Statistics:

• 1600 sites.
• 27000 volunteers
• 2 millions they support.
• Revenue 19.7m – “Small (company) but large due to the amount of people we look after”
• 1 million dollar profit (Used for safety)
• 60% of services are children services
• Raised over $535,000 in donations
• over 15000 individuals directly supported
• over 4000 free meals served
• 200 active volunteers. Over 20000 hours – “If we didn’t have volunteers, we’ll probably be broke.”

Services to Children/Young people:

• Early Children Services
• Kindergarten Inclusion support
• Pre-School field officers
• Communities for Children (CFC)

“We support kids to get through Kindergarten with disabilities.

Asylum Seeker:
Been involved the past 18 years.
Can’t work. No access to medicare. They have to pay doctor fees, which is $65. How do they pay $65? Lentara’s emergency assistance

Fact:
Lentara refers to individuals it supports as “Clients”

Asylum Seeker Housing:
Provide community housing. Support rent free. Allowances of $145 per month to help cover utility bills
House is donated by church, Lentara fills it with furniture.

What Case workers do:
Work through mental issues. Need $150000 a year to support.

Collaboration is what is first emphasised by lecturer of the Lentara studio for Media students, Seth Keen, and it is becoming clear the extent of the collaboration involved in this studio. I discover that the Media students will collaborate with Design students to work with Lentara to produce non-fiction artefacts. Lentara is a not-for-profit agency, offering much needed support to a large amount of people across Australia. To be closely involved with Lentara will be highly beneficial for me to not only understand how a not-for-profit agency like them operates, but also to learn more about the the communities they support.

To have Jeff Jones from Lentara come in and introduce himself and give a presentation to inform the entire Media and Design studio group about what Lentara is about and what they do helped build our initial relationship and understanding. Lentara deals with a wide variety of important social issues and their “mission in life” is to “create opportunities for children, families and individuals to flourish in a fair and generous community.” This is something I’m more than enthusiastic to be involved with and I’m sure a lot of the other students would be of a similar feeling.

During the presentation, I discover just how much work Lentara do, some of their statistics:

• They support over 2 million people all over Australia
• Australia’s largest non-government provider of community services
• Revenue last year was $19.7 million with a $1 million profit (used for safety)
• 200 active volunteers providing over 20000 hours

Jeff would go on to say, “If we didn’t have volunteers, we’ll probably be broke.” We soon learn that volunteering is very close to what the studio group will be doing, managing, researching and exploring ideas around current and new initiatives. Jeff stated that through his experiences with Lentara, it has changed his perspective about society and has humbled him in a way. So beyond the statistics, he was able to connect with us on a personal level.

As part of the studio, there will be groups of 5-6 people formed from the Media and Design classes. Each group will be assigned one of the following Lentara initiatives: Clothing bins, Men’s Shed, Shower Bus, Asylum Housing and Lentara identity. As we learnt on the first studio class, students from each of the programs have a wide variety of skills to offer and for the assignment to be successful, we must harness each person’s skill set the best way we can.

Currently being involved doing media work for charity Helping Hoops and favouring towards a career in the community sector, I think this studio is quickly looking like it will provide me with the experience, knowledge and opportunity I will truly value.

Trains. Can’t trust them.

It can never be good enough to plan to be on time when you have elements out of your control. But this is what I did. I planned to arrive at my first Studio class for the year right on 8.30am. Silly me for thinking Melbourne’s public transport system runs similar to Japan, where efficiency is apart of the day to day ritual. A day in the train life of Melbourne went like this… delayed train followed by a re-routed train that meant switching trains all led to my class arrival time being 8.40am. I was 10 minutes late to the studio which was my main preference, The Lentara Studio.

Aside from train life, the Lentara studio began with the students from the Media program briefly introducing themselves and later on we met our counterparts from the Design program. We had a collaboration exercise to find out what skills the opposite program offered and it would put up on a list. The end list would suggest there’s a great deal of knowledge between both programs. Our job now would be to get in our allocated groups and do what we do best and show Lentara what we can offer.

But next time I’ve got to be early.

It was merely a month since I finished editing my Screen and Media (Advanced Diploma) project, a 12 minute documentary about a South Sudanese Basketball Club based in Melbourne. At the time I was excited about getting the film screened and heading towards the path of making more docos. I had applied to continue my studies via pathway to Bachelor of Communications Media and when it came time to choosing my preference for studio, I initially looked at the two options linked to Documentary film making and my dilemma was deciding which one of these will be my first preference and which one will be my second preference. I was required to name 4 preferences and so I read the description for each one, including one which title gave no further clues as to what it was, “Non-Fiction Design.”

Not knowing what the title meant, my eyes veered to read a side caption, “How can Media and Communication Design practices be used to co-author the creation of nonfiction artefacts for the not-for-profit sector?” There’s a studio covering the not-for-profit sector? Other parts that caught my attention: “Lentara is a not-for profit agency” and “…work closely with the Lentara organisation”. After reading the description  a couple of times, Lentara – Non Fiction Design was now my number one preference. The documentary preferences will have to wait till my final Semester.

The past couple of years I have been involved with a charity called Helping Hoops. They run free basketball programs in several locations around Melbourne, including commission housing locations in Richmond, North Melbourne and Fitzroy. Every week I go to the Richmond program and my title is “Assistant Coach” – I do feel over qualified. Something else I do at Helping Hoops is I work closely with them to help promote what they do by making videos for them that has been shared through their social media, an area there are very active in. My experiences with them has led me to form very good relationships with people in the South Sudanese community and that provided me with the opportunity to make a documentary about the South Sudanese Basketball Club, Longhorns.

My involvement with Helping Hoops has provided me with many good things and to learn more about supporting people dealing with disadvantages and working closely with Lentara was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.
By Samuel Kwong