Community Regeneration in the North Coast

Warrgambi Ngamaambi A comprehensive social enterprise initiative designed to create benefit for the whole Nambucca Valley community.

Community in the Kitchen Two Youth Enterprises have been established. Yummy Catering which runs out of the YWCA, caters for local organisations and community groups, and Pulse Cafe operates in the Lismore business district.

Demonstration Garden for Sustainable Living aims to develop pariticpants knowledge and skills on sustainability and environmental practices, build team skills and realise pathways into further studies and or work.

Within the North Coast there are a significant number of communities that feature prominently in the Vinson Reports of 2004 and 2007. These communities are commonly characterised by a distinct lack of infrastructure with a marginalised and weakened third sector, little social connectivity, entrenched unemployment and an increasing incident of poor mental health among residents.

In response to these multiple and complex dimensions of disadvantage, the Outreach unit in the North Coast Institute of TAFE have initiated a Place Based model of community engagement that is congruent to the federal Social Inclusion Agenda which aims to provide opportunity and capability to learn, work, engage, aspire, increase social, civic and economic participation and have a voice together with greater responsibility.

TAFE Outreach proposes to showcase this model of practice with specific examples of individual projects that have all been developed in response to the circumstances of targeted communities. Each of these projects provide insight into the Outreach community of practice across our Institute and demonstrate a long term commitment to supporting sustainable and local solutions, targeted and timely educational delivery, increasing civic and economic participation through initiatives such as social enterprises and building a whole of government response through the establishment of strategic linkages and networks within and beyond individual communities.