Wellbeing Report 

Nuture Self, Nuture Others Excursion

Last Thursday a number of our Year 7 & 8 students attended an excursion called ‘Nurture Self, Nurture Others’, facilitated by City of Greater Dandenong Youth Services. It was a wonderful opportunity for our students to meet with other students from local schools to focus on positive mental health. 

The day started with an engaging and inspiring guest speaker. Aman shared her story of growing up in Western Sydney, where the stereotypes of her community being unsafe, full of criminals and poverty, frustrated her. As a young, Lebanese Muslim girl who regularly experienced racism, she was determined to break the stereotypes and bring her community together. She wanted to use sport to do something about the things that bothered her, creating one of the first girls AFL football teams, which went on to become the Greater Western Sydney Football Team. Her courage and determination were inspiring, and our students come away with the following messages:

• Friendship matters, having fun together matters. Lift each other up.
• Accept there are challenges in life, manage your expectations
• Celebrate your achievements, however small
• Failure is part of the process
• Find what you are passionate about and pursue it with vigour
• Know your value system and what is important to you
• Pay attention to self-care and use your support systems. Always ask for help.

The rest of the day was spent in a variety of workshops, each with a different emphasis and message on supporting personal mental health, and supporting the mental health of others. Activities included Yoga, Boxing, African Drumming, Gratitude writing, Mood Food and Self Care, where the students made their own stress balls using balloons and sand.

Our students loved participating in the day and had many valuable insights to take away which they can now apply to their life:

• The things I have taken away from this nurture self, nurture others is there’s different types of ways to help nurture others and nurture yourself. The stress ball helps with situations when I'm nervous or stressed. The gratitude letter brought a smile to my parent's face which helped make their day better even though it was a small action.
• I really liked that there were hands on activities for us to get involved, but not only did they let us do that we also got an explanation of how it can help our mental health, and what we can do help us through difficult time coping.
• I enjoyed being able to be in the same room as others that may be feeling or going through the same thing myself and others may be going through. I also think something I could take away is to not be afraid to ask for help. No matter the situation you will always be surrounded with people that love and care about you. So never be afraid to seek for help. 
• One thing that resonated with me was something that Amna Karra-Hassan said was that "never give up on a dream you have even if someone might not believe in you that you can achieve it" 

Building your child’s resilience post pandemic

Resilience is the capacity to face, overcome, be strengthened and transformed by adversity. Never before, have parents needed the skills, the knowledge and the strategies to build resilience in their children as much as they do now.

Please read the attached document on some useful strategies to help your child build their resilience through the 7 C’s:

• Competence 
• Confidence 
• Connection 
• Character 
• Contribution 
• Coping 
• Control

Ms Jackie Kol

Director of Wellbeing