Last week The Family Centre hosted its 30th Annual General Meeting. Over 50 people attended the evening to celebrate the achievements in our community.

Uncle Victor Slockee gave us a Welcome to Country full of insights from history and a taste of local language. This was followed by a brilliant vocal performance by talented Rhiana Leaupepe who is a Year 12 student at Tweed River High.

Chairperson Pam Mitchell and Executive Director David Boutkan gave a run down on the year’s achievements and plans for the coming year. 

Each year at our AGM we hear directly from people collaborating with The Family Centre on various programs and projects via The Voices from Our Community Panel of their experiences. This year:

* volunteer Julie Stephens spoke about her work with the Connecting Home team and how the Rental list project helps young people with the information they need when looking for housing in a tight housing market

* Luke Russell from Surf Dive n Ski gave a run down on Ready for Work and Youth Mentoring project which provides work placement and supports for young people who’ve been homeless increasing young people’s capability and resilience..

* Tony OBrien from Family and Community Services described the Streamlined Response pilot project to ROSH, a collaboration with The Family Centre. The impact of the project is that 100% of families involved in risk of significant harm reports to FaCS receive a visit from either FaCS staff, FaCS and TFC staff, or TFC staff giving them the opportunity to engage with a service prior to situations escalating.

* Hayley Roberts, a year 10 student from Tweed River High School spoke about her experiences as a Year 10 Peer Leader co-delivering the REALskills Take a Stand program to year 8 students, and how the Peer Leaders were able to give input into the future direction of the program.

The Family Centre’s Child and Family Services team assist families in with a dependent child or young person aged 0-12 years.
 
Families are offered an initial assessment interview, where support workers assist family members to identify their strengths and needs in relation to changes they want to make in their family circumstances and relationships.

Families are then assisted to develop goals and a support plan is negotiated with the family, outlining how we can assist them to achieve their goals.

The support plan guides and provides a focus for the work with family. This includes: counselling, enhancing parenting and relationship skills, providing information about services and helping you access those services.

The Family Centre also provide a range courses parenting courses for parents/carers.

Each year David Fleay’s Wildlife Park donates tickets to special needs and disadvantaged children and their families for a Christmas outing. The tickets are all sponsored by local businesses giving back to their community. The children and their families enjoy all the park has to offer including:

The Nocturnal House, Creatures of the Night Show, Wallaby Walk, Crocodile Feeding.

This year over 50 tickets where given to families in our community and a further 140 will be given out for the February 2019 outing.

The Family Centre appreciate the ongoing support from David Fleay’s Wildlife Park and the families we work with enjoy this yearly outing.

Seagulls in partnership with The Family Centre are helping to spread Christmas Spirit to support local families in the Northern Rivers Region.
 
Seagulls have recently erected a Christmas Giving Tree on behalf of The Family Centre. Members and the general public can donate gifts for children, young people and their families who will be doing it tough over the holiday season.
 
Donations for the Christmas Giving Tree will support households who are struggling to make ends meet and would otherwise find Christmas a strain rather than a celebration. Gifts for donation to children and young people aged between 0–18, will make a big difference.
 
Last year the Christmas Giving Tree gifted 152 children, 28 young people and 74 families in total Christmas presents.
 
You can help by donating age appropriate gifts to Seagulls club foyer. Please don’t wrap them, as we need to match gifts with family members, and our dedicated volunteers will then wrap them.
 
If you would like to find out more about the Christmas Giving Tree or assist The Family Centre in sorting and distributing the gifts see link below

The Family Centre volunteers Chris and Trish, along with Volunteer and Student Coordinator Lotte Boer attended this year’s Volunteer Leadership Forum at Griffith University Logan Campus. The purpose of the forum was to provide learning and networking opportunities across the not-for-profit and community sector to volunteers and volunteer coordinators to inspire, motivate and engage them to actively make a difference in their community – to be “renewed change makers”.
 
The forum was well attended by a diverse range of volunteers and volunteer managers from many different organisations. A highlight of the forum was hearing from a panel of three inspiring volunteers. They demonstrated that when we choose to give our time, skills and effort freely to something that we care about, volunteers can create conscious, intentional social change in their community. Often small acts of kindness, support or service to others create a ripple effect – a small pebble in the pond leads to profound impact for others.
 
The forum also reflected on how volunteering leads to personal growth and change which in turn can be a driver for social change in our communities, and our responsibility to positively affect people, place and planet.
 
Each and every volunteer at The Family Centre is unique and adds their individual value to our organisation by intentionally giving their time and supporting our values and vision for our community and its people.
 
If you like the sound of giving back, personal growth and that feel good side effect you get from contributing why not sign up to our Christmas gift wrapping fundraiser this year. 
 
“Volunteers are the heart of our community and often sacrifice so much in order to help others. You are unseen, unsung heroes of our community and the foundations of our community”

In Term 1 2019, The Family Centre will be delivering Bringing up Great Kids for the first time, and we are delivering it first in Murwillumbah.
 
Bringing up Great Kids is a 6 week course for parents/carers with children 0-12 years. In the course parents/carers have the opportunity to identify the important messages they want to convey to their children and more clearly understand the messages that children communicate to their parents.  Parents/carers aim to discover how to overcome some of the obstacles that are getting in the way of being the kind of parent/carer they would like to be by developing awareness of the cues that trigger unhelpful or ineffective responses. During the course parent/carers will learn about the brain development of their children and understand how to meet their children’s growing needs.
 
Our course facilitators Jess and Paula are very excited to bring this new course to the parents/carers in the community.

To find our more call (07) 5524 8711 or email [email protected]