There’s exciting news at the Healesville Living and Learning Centre as we edge closer to the turn of the year.
Staff returning to the centre, development at the site and new activities and programs are all to come.
Executive officer Nich Rogers said they’re transforming the Healesville Living and Learning Centre into a community hub.
“We’re going to be doing some redevelopments at the site in terms of improving the buildings, but we’re also going to be doing a whole bunch of things around providing a more diverse range of programs and services down there,” he said.
“It’s a bit of a reimagination of what the Healesville Living and Learning Centre is, and we want to really see it as a living room for the community in a way, a place where people can come, can hang out, can get information, can participate in activities in a really easy, no stress, no pressure environment.
“A big part of that is the staff returning back to the centre… we think responsiveness and communication will be improved by having our staff back at the site where we run our classes and programs.”
Healesville Living and Learning Centre staff have been operating out of the Healesville Library for a period of time.
Mr Rogers said their vision is to make the centre another place where people in Healesville can come together, but they want to create that with the community.
“That’s a really important missing piece of the puzzle that we want to include the community much more heavily in decisions about what operates at the centre, what type of stfff we want at the centre, how we should run our services,” he said.
“We really want the community to take more of a leadership role in thinking about how the centre can be best serving the community.”
“If someone in the community has got a great idea, they’re looking for a place to host that idea, they’re looking for help to promote that idea and it’s a community-minded idea, we might be the place for them that allows them to make a dollar out of their activity while also supporting the community.”
Recent consultation from the centre spoke to about 150 people from the Healesville community about what they’d like to see, but they have hopes of hearing from more. Practical skills, art, youth activities and school holiday programs were all common requests, as well as continuing their current services.
Mr Rogers said having community hubs is fundamental and adds a sense of cohesion to the community.
“They have a central point, a belonging place and we want Healesville Living and Learning Centre to be that community hub, I think it’s absolutely fundamental to people’s sense of having a sense of connection to their community and feeling safe in their community,” he said.
“Equally, we want to be a place where people can come and talk about things that they are seeing in the community, be they opportunities or issues, they can come and talk to us, and they’ve got a central point where they can come and get more information.
“That could be anything, it could be information about how do I talk to the council about collecting my rubbish, or it could be about a bigger issue around how do we progress reconciliation in the local area…we can be all of those things at the hub.”
