Tara Murray
Sunshine Heights Primary School will turn its focus to mental health and wellbeing when it runs a mental health festival in March.
The week-long ‘Know Yourself, Show Yourself, Grow Yourself’ festival is aimed at bringing together different services and providers to help make accessing help easier.
School wellbeing, inclusion, community and engagement lead teacher Francine Sculli said the school was keen to make this a really major community event.
“We’re really excited to bring the community together on such an important piece and it’s a really good opportunity to normalise conversations around these struggles,” she said.
“I’m really passionate about mental health and when I saw the government opportunity [to apply for funding] I kind of thought about running a festival on the love yourself concept.”
Ms Sculli said the school had been doing work in the mental health sector previously, but this event would be 10 times bigger.
She said this was really important following the COVID-19 pandemic, where many people didn’t know how or where to access services.
“We want to bring all the elements together,” she said.
“It will be a week full of different activities. There will be services doing meditation at 8am in the morning.
“Places like Headspace Sunshine and IPC will be there and have workshops and stalls.
“You can get information on how to access services and we want to celebrate cultural diversity.
There will be food and music at the festival and they are looking to get one of the local secondary colleges involved to discuss some of the work they’ve done.
Ms Sculli said they were keen to get more members of the community involved in the festival.
As part of the planning and development stage, the school will form a community advisory committee that represents the rich tapestry of the socio, cultural, linguistic, gender, sexual, ability and neurological diversity in Sunshine.
“We’re also looking for community members or organisations that want to get involved,” she said.
“We’re looking for people who want to run stalls and we’re looking for performers. We want to see how we can use the festival as a platform.”
Details: Francine.Sculli@education.vic.gov.au
