Within Our Community
St Kilda Inclusion Project
Introducing SIP
What kind of opportunities has SIP offered?
What have people had to say about SIP?
Getting Started – early SIP projects to engage the community
Building capacity
Partnership Approaches
For more information
Introducing SIP
The St Kilda Inclusion Project – or SIP – commenced in November 2008. It is a project that aims to see St Kilda become a more welcoming place. It’s aimed to give residents from all backgrounds the opportunity to be a part of and enjoy community life.
Conceived as a response to realities of economic and social extreme in the local area, SIP has used a range of community development approaches. Working across individual, service and broader community levels SIP has sought to increase opportunities for those less connected to economic, social and civic life.
SIP is an initiative of the City of Port Phillip, the Department of Planning and Community Development and the Department of Human Services.
Click for an overview of the St Kilda Inclusion Project.
What kind of opportunities has SIP offered?
Individuals
- Choice and opportunity to give voice to local issues
- Training, volunteer and employment options
- Involvement in social activities such as sports and the arts
- Better access and more say about services
Community organisations
- Networking and linkages between staff and organisations
- Provision of connection points into government
- Flexible and responsive approaches to local social inclusion issues and opportunities
- Promotion of a shared social inclusion agenda
- Broader community awareness raising about issues linked to social exclusion
What have people had to say about SIP?
‘It’s an opportunity to include people who may not be spoken for and the disadvantaged’.
‘Giving people a chance to get involved in the community - those who have been unemployed for some time, those with different backgrounds’.
‘It’s been an invaluable asset to this community. In our organisation’s case SIP has helped to inform, guide and connect’.
Getting Started - early SIP projects to engage the community
Great Wall of St Kilda
The Great Wall of St Kilda is an 11 by 5 meters clay tile mural featuring 600 small ceramic tiles made by community members and 207 large tiles created by artist Camille Monet. Camille’s large tiles capture the past and present characters and stories that make St Kilda such a diverse and engaging place. Creating the tiles used in the wall was a social inclusion venture in its own right undertaken at the commencement of the SIP. Many of the people depicted in the mural are local characters and legends. Check it out in at the Talbot Reserve, cnr Barkly and Carlisle St.
Jackson St Mural
In late March 2009, the creation of a new mural in a lane off Fitzroy Street established greater community points of connection for the SIP. The mural with the theme of “Belonging in St Kilda” involved local artist Camille Monet working with 77 residents. The main goal of the project was to bring people from all backgrounds together in an enjoyable activity that cut across all barriers. People who participated in the mural included residents from local houses, the Gatwick, Salvation Army Crisis Centre, Rooming Houses and Galiamble.
Click to see the Jackson St Mural evaluation report.
Audio Walking Tour
Looking for a Girl is a fictional story of a detective who undertakes interviews with a range of outreach and support agency staff and residents from the St Kilda area to find a girl who has left home. The fictional story has been constructed around real to life interviews, some of which involving SIP leadership team members. The audio tour commenced in 2009 and was launched as a downloadable file with accompanying street map in 2001. This project gives insights into resilience, challenges and obstacles associated with surviving on the streets.
Click here to access the downloadable audio file and map of Looking for a Girl.
SIP Community Leadership Program
SIP has run two Community Leadership Courses involving 19 residents linked to or referred by local outreach and support agencies. The course focused on participants understanding their personal communication style, learning how to write a presentation, public speaking, contributing respectfully to a meeting and impromptu speaking. Many participants have taken up other activities such as involvement in theatre groups, facilitation training, and researchers in community consultations for the City of Port Phillip and as consumer representatives for other agencies.
Click for a summary of the SIP Community Leadership Program.
Community Research – Snapshot of living in St Kilda
Nine of SIP’s leadership training graduates went on to become trained community researchers. Working with the SIP they visited drop in centres, rooming houses, services and gathering places to collect information from their peers about what social inclusion really means on a practical level for people seen as disadvantaged. They interviewed 201 people and asked questions about belonging, discrimination and respect in St Kilda. The research was designed to capture marginalized groups such as the homeless that are often missed in traditional data collection due to requiring residential addresses or telephone connections.
Click to see the Snapshot of St Kilda Report.
Concierge Training
SIP in partnership with various organisations has run two concierge training courses designed to teach conflict resolution and communication skills to suit specific work environments. The first course was offered to seven Gatwick Hotel residents and staff to assist them in improving their policies and procedures. Twelve local parkies participated in the second course as a part of being employed as marshals in the Yalukit William Ngaree Festival held in O’Donnell gardens.
Click to read an evaluation on the Gatwick concierge course.
SIP Seeding Grants
SIP has provided small grants to local groups for projects that encourage greater participation in community life for St Kilda’s most marginalised residents. 13 projects have been funded included opportunities for sporting and social activities such as the Saints Netball Team, the Community Kitchen and the Espy Chat Group. There have also been cultural projects with a community education element such as the Torch’s Whole New World and the St Kilda Parkies documentary produced by SKYS and Ngwala.
SIP Committee
Projects emerging from within the SIP have been informed and guided by an actively involved Committee of representatives from state and local government, local service organisations as well as community representatives.
Site UnSeen
SIP has teamed up with the City of Port Phillip Community Group, Many Moons, Sacred Heart Mission and the City of Port Phillip (CoPP) to develop a community education project in the form of a multi media installation. Created by art and theatre workers collaborating with communities of people who have experienced homelessness, Site UnSeen utilises iconic locations around St Kilda to present the reality of those who are most invisible, and has been co-created by people who have been there. Site UnSeen was included in the 2011 Melbourne International Arts Festival major program.
For more information visit www.siteunseen.com.au.
Evaluation Partnership
At the commencement of 2009, SIP established a partnership with Monash University to lead evaluation activity on behalf of the initiative. The evaluation methodology gave consideration to impact, reach and what fundamentally became the most important aspects of SIP. Key areas of evaluation focus included capacity building, participation, strengthened connections, impact of learnings dissemination, voice, partnership and business engagement. A final report will be available in December 2011.
Click to read the Final Evaluation Report.
SIP Business Partnership
SIP partnered with specialist consultancy Think HQ to explore business and the community under the SIP umbrella. This project approach avoided adopting a one-way cash donation mentality but rather established a team approach for brokering and commencing genuine ongoing partnerships between local businesses and community groups. As a result of this project Red Scooter, a local events management business became an active partnership with Port Phillip Community Group working together towards Anti Poverty Week events. Web Prophets assisted local community group Gatehouse to not only improve their website but form new business connections with the Hilton Hotel resulting in greater fundraising capacity. The Grossi family became strong advocates of Site UnSeen and hosted a VIP event for the project at their Mirka Restaurant in Fitzroy St.
Business Partnerships and Government
CoPP Community Development and Economic Development Departments have been exploring together opportunities for strengthening each others’ work. One example of such work is the proposed incorporation of an online suite of business and community partnership options into Port Phillip Gives. This website provides an online means for promoting greater community business partnership benefits, via case study learnings and a data base for matching business interest with community need.
St Kilda Inclusion Centre (SKIC)
The proposed St Kilda Inclusion Centre (SKIC) is an infrastructure development project that the SIP has actively supported. The vision for the SKIC commenced more than six years ago and has been led by the St Kilda Uniting Church Parish Mission and actively supported by the three organisations that operate from the currently run down facility that occupies the proposed building site on the corner of Chapel and Carlisle Streets, St Kilda. The original vision for the SKIC encompassed a five level, multi-purpose community facility bringing together business and enterprise, service and meeting space and social and private housing. SIP has been a point of contact for linking local planning effort to broader state government interest and agenda. The intent of this linking has been to gain advocacy resulting in multi-sourcing resourcing enabling the vision for the centre to become a reality.
Public Housing Estates
SIP has brought together groups of staff from local organisations and government along with state government to give shared opportunities to issues and opportunities on public housing estates. Such collective effort has included a joint funding submission to the Australian Government seeking $500,000 to use a social inclusion lens to build a stronger health focus on local estates. A snapshot document containing data collected and reflected in the HC submission was developed with the intent to aid local community groups in statistically unpacking the realities of disadvantage in gentrified communities when preparing funding submissions or project / program proposals.
Click here to read the SIP public housing data snapshot.
Key points of SIP contact:
Michele Leonard, City of Port Phillip, mleonard@portphillip.vic.gov.au
Anita Francis, Department of Human Services 0431 071 148 or anita.francis@dhs.vic.gov.au
