Family & Friends Membership

The Family & Friends committee needs your help! If you are a member of the school community, we would love to hear from you. The committee can only achieve as much as we as community members put in. Please get in touch with us at contact.smppfsff@gmail.com to volunteer your talents, time, ideas – anything! As this is the school’s first year, we are really starting from scratch and need all the help we can get. A special thank you to all of those who have volunteered their time so far.

There are many things that can be done at our wonderful new school. The honest truth is that without the help of more volunteers, a lot of these things won’t happen. So please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us. Our meetings are monthly and are listed on Compass, or you can have a chat with any of our existing members to find out more.

Our next meeting will be held at the school on Tuesday 30th July from 6pm. We hope to see you there!

Event Sustainability

Last month was the first time the group held an event on school grounds. To successfully run the Winter Picnic and Lantern Walk as a sustainable event, we used guidance from the St Kilda Eco Centre, Albert Park Primary School and St Kilda Primary School to reduce single use plastics and to recycle/rethink other purchases for events.

Thanks to funding provided by the Eco Centre St Kilda and the City of Port Phillip we purchased 100 reusable cups, plates and bowls, plus 30 cutlery sets and storage containers to serve our food at events. These are now in the kitchen for students to use during Passion Time and for school events. Thanks to generous donations from parents of the crockery and cutlery for the Open Day afternoon tea, we were able to apply for an extra $130 in funding to cover costs. We borrowed the hot chocolate Keep Cups from Albert Park Primary School.

The event was a huge success with little cleaning to be done within the school grounds. Additionally the event chose not to purchase single use plastic decorations or glow sticks for the event. Thank you to everyone who reused a light from home to power their lanterns as this reduced the number of single use extra batteries purchased.

Thank you again to all those who collected and cleaned dishes on the night. We kept at least 300 cups, plates, bowls and spoons out of landfill. If you can, please BYO cups to future events as this does help the dishwashers.

A future goal for sustainable events at the school will be to compost food scraps. Hopefully we will be successful in a grant application this term so we can introduce composting.

Sustainable Idea

Use your milk bottle lantern as a pencils and texta holder, or put some holes in the bottom and plant some herbs in it.

If sustainability is your passion please contact Family & Friends to help out and ensure we make each event easy, fun and Penguin Friendly.

https://www.ecocentre.com/penguinfriendlyevents

Grants

We were delighted to receive a grant of $570 from the City of Port Phillip to assist with costs of our lantern walk!

Seeking Donations for Silent Auction Items

The upcoming Disco Bingo will see a number of items that have been graciously donated by local businesses up for Silent Auction. We would also like you to consider if there is something you would like to offer to put up for Auction. We have already received some great offers from our school community – such as a voucher for a home-cooked dinner, baked goods and hand-knitted items. These are fantastic Auction items! Please, please, think out of the box and get in touch with us with your donated Auction item.

Lantern Walk

Thank you very much to everyone who made it out for our first Winter Picnic and Lantern Walk. It was such a wonderful sight to see the children and their lanterns and who knew we had so many passionate drummers!

What a delightful community evening and we appreciate everyone’s help in the planning and event delivery. Without volunteers these fun activities would not be possible. So we’re sending our heartfelt thanks to all our volunteers.

It was a thrill to have the children play in the school at night and hear the crackle of fires safely burning (thanks to our risk assessment team for ensuring the event ran safely).

Thank you to our supporters for their generous donations, including Good Guys, Spotlight, Woolworths, Coles, Bunnings, City of Port Phillip and Albert Park Primary School for sharing their keep cups for the evening. Thank you to all the parents who loaned/donated lights, pots, games, drumsticks and inspired ideas.

Also please share your ideas to grow upon the success of this year’s Lantern Walk. With a longer planning time, imagine the possibilities for Winter Picnic and Lantern Walk 2020.

Disco Bingo

Family & Friends Roles

We now have a Compliance Liaison! One of our parents, Nicole Campbell, has graciously taken on the role of Families & Friends Legalities Liaison, which is a really important role in the committee, so thank you Nicole for keeping us all in line with the latest rules and regulations and for helping to make sure we execute all our initiatives in the best way.

Naomi Hobson, who is a parent at the school, has temporarily taken on the challenge of Environment & Sustainability Liaison for the group, however we are looking for a volunteer for this role for the rest of the year. If you’re passionate about ensuring our initiatives represent our values as a school in regards to the environment, then please reach out, we’d love the help!

THE SIGNAL

Issue 6 · 18 Jul 2019

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