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Key ingredients of effective interventions
9. Community "hubs"
Underpinning all hubs is an integrated approach to child and family service provision in order to break down practical and structural barriers to accessibility for rural/remote, Indigenous and CALD families in particular.
Engagement is facilitated by locating hubs in primary schools and through outreach services, including a home-visiting service and visits to smaller rural centres to deliver services. Hubs are also designed to be welcoming, informal, non-threatening and universally accessible.
The hub is a welcoming place. It is a place where someone will say “hello”; that you can “rock up to” anytime. (Project Manager, Breaking the Cycles)
A family-centred approach is used, and outcomes are sometimes achieved through a formal needs assessment. As many of the client families have multiple and complex needs, co-location of services has enabled a seamless transition from one service to another. A strong professional training and development ethos encourages workers to be multiskilled in order to respond to a family’s multiple needs.
Support from a broader network of peers and colleagues is a crucial ingredient across all programs, with peers acting as learning and information advocates and as mentors to help expand the knowledge base of the workers in the hub.
In order to be responsive to the needs of the CALD and Indigenous communities, service users are matched with staff/volunteers of similar background, highly skilled facilitators and bilingual workers deliver the programs, and culturally meaningful practices are adopted, such as multigenerational dialogues. Across the programs, qualified and skilled staff/mentors/volunteers are essential to enable the establishment of trusting relationships with the clients.
Source: Promising Practice Profiles: Final report (PDF 2.2 MB) (Soriano, Clark & Wise. 2008). p43
List of key ingredients:
- Parenting and family support
- Parenting support for young parents
- Early learning and care
- Supporting "first-time" mothers
- School readiness
- Supporting children with additional needs
- Supporting "at risk" youth
- Capacity-building for service providers and enhancement of service provision
- Community "hubs"
- Social inclusion initiatives