Place-Based Resilience during COVID-19: Logan Together
With the arrival of COVID-19, it quickly became apparent to Logan Together that there were urgent needs to be met in the community and that new partnerships and responses would be required.
Community Driven Response and Recovery in a time of COVID-19
Logan Together Case Study
Logan Together is a long term, whole of community movement to create the best life opportunities for every child in Logan. Logan Together reflects a diverse group of people from every part of the community who share a passion for their kids’ future. The Logan Together initiative taps into this diverse community and what’s needed to make it thrive has required a genuine collaboration between community, industry and government who all have the same goal in mind – a bright future for children.
Logan Together works on a range of projects and many partner projects as well. This includes initiatives such as: ensuring a smoother transition for children going from kindergarten to preparatory school; forging a strong network of diverse community service providers to ensure resources get to the community members who need them; and a stronger parent project that raises parents’ awareness of the key things their child needs.
Supporting the system through partnerships and coordination
With the arrival of COVID-19, it quickly became apparent that there were urgent needs to be met in the community and that new partnerships and responses would be required. To find out how local service providers were responding, and to offer their support, Logan Together created an Action Group that maintains weekly contact with over 50 service providers in the area.
Tailoring communications to suit local contexts and audiences
With the move to social isolation and online working, Logan Together saw the need to maintain the connections and momentum that had been occurring across many local initiatives. There were also few online places that local people could visit to share their own experiences and exchange stories and knowledge. Within 5 days, Logan Together created a virtual platform called Stronger Together Logan that is a curated information exchange and message board with exclusive local content. Within weeks, the website had more than 1000 users per day accessing and sharing content, empowering locals to help each other and help themselves.
Helping create and maintain connections to services and support
To keep local services and support functioning, prevent people falling through the cracks and maintain critical connections, Logan Together has also sourced numerous vans to begin mobile outreach and neighbourhood visits.
Adapting and innovating to fill critical gaps
With the advent of school closures and online learning, the digital divide between vulnerable families and the lack of equal learning opportunities became glaringly apparent. Logan Together forged a new partnership with an electronic waste recycling social enterprise, Substation33, to urgently refurbish laptops for students.
350 laptops have now been made available and the donations of further computers, screens, keyboards and cables is continuing.
Logan Together also partnered with a specialist physical activity organisation to develop learning and activity packs that would enable children to be active at home. 1000 packs have now been delivered locally.
While providing PPE and hand sanitiser are not the normal remit of Logan Together, when the local hospitals began running out, Logan Together staff began contacting beauticians to source face masks and enrolled a local scientist in the production of hand sanitiser. The sourced critical PPE to enable frontline services for at-risk First Nations communities to continue. This is all in addition to coordinating distribution of food parcels, maintaining ‘business as usual’ services, and effectively keeping the doors open to the community.
Advocating on behalf of the community to the wider system
Logan Together is coordinating interested parties on the needs of place-based approaches in the COVID-19 recovery. They are also in the process of developing a Local Social Recovery Plan.
“COVID-19 has highlighted that there is a clear divide to access free state education for families that don’t have a computer and access to the internet in the home. This has been unsettling and has caused extra stresses for children and their families in Logan.”
Angela TuiSamoa – Community Connector, Logan Together
Like many philanthropic foundations, we face the challenge of how a relatively small family foundation—can make an outsized impact on the complex and intertwined issues that affect people and the places they live. We find the answer embedded in our DNA as an organisation, and the clue is in our name – Dusseldorp Forum.
Through a series of Narrative Practice workshops, Dusseldorp Forum’s partners from Kempsey, Bourke, Moree and Mt Druitt shared stories about the ways their communities are made stronger by identifying the skills, beliefs, knowledges and values that assist them in facing their struggles.
Their words reveal the care, connection and resistance of generations of First Nations communities.
PLACE – new national infrastructure to support and enable place-based change
Dusseldorp Forum is proud to be one of the initial supporters of PLACE as part of a $38.6 million partnership with the Australian Government, the Minderoo Foundation, Paul Ramsay Foundation, Ian Potter Foundation and the Bryan Foundation.
