[b]Welfare support for local children[/b]
I arrived home from my Nia dance class at The Hills Community Centre to find my letterbox full of advertising mail. We all have the experience don’t we.
One of the letters was from The Smith Family seeking donations and saying they don’t yet have enough donors for the children in need as yet for this school year.
One of our local groups the View Club is a sponsor of The Smith Family and the fund-raising they do locally goes to The Smith Family.
The Smith Family is a national organisation (head offices in Sydney) and like many of these large welfare organisations they are not paying attention to local needs. There are some obvious national hot-spots (or should that be ‘black spots’) where welfare needs are obvious. Most of the big welfare organisations are active in these black spot areas. Almost none of them are active locally around here.
There was an Expo of not-for-profit and welfare organisations in the city last year and we took the time to walk around all the stalls and ask them what involvement they had in this area. Typically they would look down the list of suburbs where they were active (Logan always featured big). A couple were active here locally (the Rural Fire Brigade)but the stand-out thing we took away is that this area is getting overlooked.
In one way that is a good thing because it is a recognition that we are not a ‘black spot’. We’re not a wealthy area but we’re not a wildly disadvantaged area. We have very low crime rates. The Ferny Grove Police Station is a great local asset.
However we have a lot of children in what the MySchool website calls ‘the Bottom Quarter’. We have less than our share of the national average (25%). That would give us 1326 in the Bottom Quarter. In fact we have 858 school children locally in ‘the Bottom Quarter’. That is still a lot of children not much short of 1000 children.
I would like to be able to donate to an organisation like The Smith Family and be able to have that donation go to a local child living in this area going to one of our local schools. I have met local families who are struggling paying high rents and struggling to have enough money left for food and school uniforms and charges. They can approach The Smith Family for help all in complete confidentiality. Speaking personally I’d also like to know that we were able to know that we were helping those in need locally first.
You might be wondering how I calculated that we have 858 children in ‘the Bottom Quarter’locally – they’re the ones most likely to be experiencing some form of disadvantage. Well the MySchool website says how many children go to each local school and what percentage for each school are in the Bottom Quarter. These figures vary a lot. Ferny Grove State High School is the biggest with 1478 children. Pine Community School is the smallest with 64 children. Percentages in ‘the Bottom Quarter’ range from 28% down to 7%. So there is a big spread.
But why can’t we look after our own children? Is 858 children too many for this community to rally around and make a difference to their education? I know that at Grovely State School some members of Hope City Church are mentoring disadvantaged children one on one. I suspect that all over our valley and hills there are volunteers helping children with their schooling reading aloud to them helping them with maths. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to hear the stories of who is doing what? And maybe to expand this so that all the children in the Bottom Quarter are getting some support and maybe given a chance they wouldn’t otherwise have had.
For example we are talking 36 children at St Andrews. How hard would it be for the parents and community associated with St Andrews to organise special help for 36 children? This is not an insurmountable challenge.
This is the wonderful thing about local. When you think truly local you start to see the exact dimension of the task in hand that needs addressing. Each of those 36 children has a name and a story and needs that could be particularised. This is not some huge nebulous anonymous challenge. Each of those children will make a better contribution to our community in future if we help them now than if we leave them to find school difficult and to fail.