Validation Project

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Validation Project Workshops and Gatherings

From the initial women’s gatherings, the plans for face-to-face program delivery changed quickly with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Programming deliverables needed to be reconsidered and pivoted to a digital platform.

From August to September the following programs were delivered online:

• Come Join Us, Virtual Catch up
• Virtual Basic Yoga with Mia from Forster Yoga studio
• Art Therapy
• Wholesome Food Co & Southlake Youth Morisset invited the women to attend a 6-week Online Nutrition & Cooking Series.

By October 2021, restrictions had been lifted for some and we were able to resume face to face programming and over a period of the next 12 to 13 months, we successfully delivered and facilitated over 20 workshops and events.

The Validation Project offered a diverse array of workshops from creative hands-on workshop to educational nature walks, training workshops as well as a daylong health and wellbeing day.

The following list is an example of the programming enjoyed by the women:

• Resin Cheese Board Making Workshop
• Bushwalk with Manning Landcare at Blackhead Reserve
• Lifeline Accidental Counsellor Training

From February and May 2022, we held sessions of Storytelling at local community halls and at the Manning Regional Art Gallery. These workshops offered the women the opportunity to share and tell their stories through different creative mediums, including:

• Storytelling Workshop | Story Sharing
• Storytelling Workshop | Incidental Object
• Storytelling Workshop | Story through movement
• Storytelling Workshop | Eco Dyeing and Slow Stitching
• Storytelling Workshop | Through Paint and Collage
• Women’s Gathering at Elands| Yoga |Health Nurse| Eco Dyeing

At the Story Sharing workshops, the women shared their lived experiences of the bushfires, and they came to realise, as a group, that they wanted to share their experiences with the broader community. From this came the suggestion of recording the women’s stories and sharing them to the wider community came to fruition.

With an injection of funding from the Disaster Recovery Grant, the Validation Project was able to be extended until June – July 2022. We were able to run additional workshops and events for the women along with engaging a videographer to film and create a session of short films of the women’s stories, two years in from 19/20 Black Summer Bushfires.

These stories are now available on the Manning Valley Neighbourhood Service’s YouTube channel and publicity accessible.

The women were also given a UBS memory stick with a copy of all their short films and have been encouraged to share their stories. MVNS has been sharing stories on their Facebook page and Cameron Marshell from ABC radio did an interview on the women’s stories and shared the audio version of the stories on his morning radio show.

To celebrate the film’s completion and the finale of the Validation Project, we held a Women’s Celebration, afternoon tea and film screening at the Wingham CWA room with 25 women in attendance.

Outcomes

In May and June 2022, The Validation Project engaged the services of three women involved in the Validation Project. Each of these women are also artists in their own right with extensive experience in program delivery. With the additional funding the project received, we paid these artists to facilitate creative workshops for the other Validation Project women. All three workshop were well attended and offered the facilitator a safe space to rebuild their skills and confidences in program delivery.

Over the past 13 months of the Validation Project, we have successfully delivered and facilitated over 20 workshops and events for the women, with an estimate of over 100 women and their families positively benefiting.

Personally, I have seen the women’s confidence grow, smiles and joy return to their faces, new friendships formed, invitations given and accepted, wider community connections grow, the sharing of personal experiences, talk about preparing for the future disasters, and real demonstrations of a new normal, with signs of true resilience.

Future plans: from the initial consultation the women indicated a strong need for a Women’s Shed. In 2022 MVNS was successful in a grant application to make the Women’s Shed happen. The funding covers a worker to manage the project over a 27 months period.

Testimonials