Neighbourhood Houses Victoria is partnering with Carers Victoria to deliver over $400,000 in funding to ten neighbourhood houses to meaningfully engage with carers in their community.
The Connecting Carer’s program provides ten neighbourhood and community houses and centres with $40,000 each to develop and implement projects that will assist unpaid carers on their path to employment. These ten houses are spread across the state to work in a number of diverse communities.
“We know a carers employment journey can be difficult, which is why this new Connecting Carers Project is an important way to fill the gap,” Neighbourhood Houses Victoria CEO Nicole Battle said.
“With carers often left out of the workforce due to their complex caring needs these programs look to re-engage them with the community and assist them in their pathway to paid employment”.
These projects will assist carers throughout their employment journey and will give more Victorian carers an opportunity to access tailored employment support. The program will support carers to enter or re-enter the workforce, undertake vocational training, or up-skill to become job ready. These include pre-employment mentoring to build confidence, practical assistance such as respite and material support, resume writing and building with Drake International, carer relief and post-employment mentoring and support to help carers maintain employment.
With the participating houses in metropolitan, regional and remote areas in Victoria, a one size fits all approach is not appropriate to understand the needs of carers. As such neighbourhood houses are perfectly poised to tailor their services to cater to the diverse needs of carers across the state.
“We want to make sure that carers get the support they need, not matter where they are on their employment pathway.”.
The houses participating in the Connecting Carers Program are;
- Ballarat Neighbourhood Centre
- Colverdale Community Centre
- Cobram Community House
- Open Door Neighbourhood House
- Prahran Community Learning Centre
- Red Cliffs Community Resource Centre
- Sale Neighbourhood House
- Springvale Neighbourhood House
- Wyndham Community & Education Centre
- Yarraville Community Centre
