Whyalla pride week

With Whyalla Pride Week just around the corner, Open Up Community Group event coordinator Vicki Blackburn said both internationally and nationally pride week is usually celebrated for a different reason. Ms Blackburn said Pride Week in many other parts of Australia and the world, recognises and celebrates the people and events that inspire the courage, solidarity, pride, diversity and strong sense of community of gay, lesbian, bisexual, intersex and transgender GLBT people.

In celebrating Pride Week, GLBTs all over Australia organise cultural activities that bring communities together in a safe and positive environment. The Starship Enterprise aims to create a space that is designed and run by young people providing them with an opportunity to experiment with entrepreneurship whilst gaining valuable work and life skills, solidifying and expanding their existing social networks, and making a little profit along the way.

The project utilises an existing youth space with a commercial kitchen to create a Cafe environment once a week for four months. The Cafe will be led by young people. The program will also provide training for a variety of directed skill development for 10 young people including:. Ten young people, 4 committed coordinators and many hands-on supporters has made this journey totally amazing! This project has achieved amazing outcomes for our 1 Captain and 9 co-pilots, in training, relationship building, confidence, and general life skill and personal development.

Friendships have been made, relationships built, this program has encouraged this group of vulnerable youth to engage in as many opportunities possible in four months. We know this program has been valuable to our crew as they tell us this all the time.

This group of young people have been isolated, and since they have left high school most of the group have not taken part in any formalised training or community leadership opportunities. We are so proud of how far this group has come and it is not over yet! These ten young people we believe deserve a chance to try something new. We also had the advantage of the extra wrap-around support from the headspace team within the project to assist these young people.

Our program was created in total consultation with our focus groups. The program direction was also fashioned to be fluid, so our participants could in a way choose their own adventure, with a mixture of structured training, team building and opportunities chosen by the group, this is actually how the four-month program panned out.

This project has seen our outcomes blown out of the water, we started with ten participants, and we completed the program with all ten, due to the vulnerability of our participants we were unsure of how the program would end. Our cohort of young people has many barriers in their lives including trauma, isolation, low resilience, and poor mental wellbeing. This program has given them something to get out of bed for, they have been able to connect with ten like-minded people with similar mental health concerns and barriers.

COVID 19 has made it harder for our most vulnerable people to connect. Weekends and public holidays 10am—4pm. Contact us by filling out the form below and pressing "submit". Whyalla unearth festival That's it for another year! The team at Advancing Whyalla is set to start planning for Pride Week as soon as possible with plans for next year's event to be even bigger. Miss Blunt said community groups have already been contacting Advancing Whyalla to see how they can be involved in next year's event after seeing the success of this year's.