A STORYTELLING project and mentoring program are two areas being explored by a Berri community group focused on improving wellbeing in the town.
Berri was one of six towns in the running for 10 years of funding through the Fay Fuller Foundation’s Our Town initiative.
Although the town was unsuccessful in securing long-term support, the local committee did receive a $50,000 grant and assistance from the foundation to secure additional funding.
Our Town Berri committee member Julie Ahrens said creating a plan to improve wellbeing in the town had been a valuable experience.
“The capacity building of us as citizens has been amazing,” she said.
“We’ve all been really excited to be on this journey.
“We’ve had a coach work with us over the year who has helped us with process and building our own capacity to go out to our communities and talk, understand and learn.”
Ms Ahrens said the group had used data, interviews and literature research to identify challenges and opportunities in the local community.
“Berri’s changed a lot – we used to be a fruit town but what are we now?” she said.
“There was also some excitement about all the new building in the town.
“A builder told me recently that there was over $50 million worth of building going on in Berri… but what does that mean for us? How do we bring our citizens together?”
Ms Ahrens said the storytelling and mentoring projects were two ideas that came out of the research process.
“We are in talks with an organisation that creates storytelling projects to work out how we might capture the stories of Berri and how we might bring generations together to share our stories, with the idea of some sort of artistic presentation that could be part of our town,” she said.
“There is a lot of potential about collecting the stories, bringing them together and having them as part of our community.
“The second aspect we want to go after is the mentoring.
“One of the things that came out of our investigations was that generations wanted to work together, but they weren’t sure how to go about that.
“We might smart small – we might have some community volunteers… working with kids in the schools, and the mentoring can work both ways because young people could teach older people to use technology and things like that.”
Ms Ahrens said the Berri community would be consulted and heavily involved in the Our Town projects as they develop over the coming months.
“We’re going slow and steady because it’s not something we need to rush,” she said.
“We’re about building wellbeing, which we know will have long-term positive effects for the community.”