General News
15 August, 2022
Committee for Maryborough project to bring local stories to life
A project aimed at changing Maryborough’s story, capturing its liveability and strengthening the community is underway in a bid to not only support locals in reconnecting, but attracting new residents to town. The Committee for Maryborough is...
A project aimed at changing Maryborough’s story, capturing its liveability and strengthening the community is underway in a bid to not only support locals in reconnecting, but attracting new residents to town.
The Committee for Maryborough is collaborating with My Word — Connect Through Stories, the Australian Multicultural Foundation and Community Language Schools Aust to deliver the project, which is expected to begin rolling out before Christmas.
The project will centre around capturing the stories of local people to foster a sense of pride, place and identity in the community, support youth connection and engagement, enable residents to reconnect post-COVID and attract new people to move to the area by changing Maryborough’s story of disadvantage.
My Word — Connect Through Stories co-founder David Stewart said the project would achieve a number of things, including reconnecting the community, encouraging people to move to the area and engaging youth.
“If you think of communities today and what they’ve been through with COVID and the current issues we have, there’s a need for communities to come back and re-socialise and to also think how they can attract their fair share of workers and employees,” he said.
“The way of doing that, compared to other larger communities which have more resources, is to capture identity and showcase your liveability through storytelling which can only be told and showcased by the people actually living in that community.
“This is a project that allows community groups to come together and work out how they can focus their collective efforts on the greater good, rather than working in silos.”
The project kicked off on Friday with a number of community members representing different groups, organisations and businesses attending a roundtable discussion to help shape the project.
“Friday was about what I call getting a coalition of the community together to capture their ideas and thoughts to make sure it’s a community project, not just something that’s introduced,” Mr Stewart said.
“In particular, this coalition’s role is to determine how we capture people and what the issues are that we want to address.
“Between now and Christmas we’re modelling it, kickstarting it and starting to implement it.”
The project is in part supported through $8000 in funding the Committee for Maryborough received from the Foundation for Rural Regional Renewal’s Strengthening Rural Communities program.
Committee for Maryborough chair John Sedunary described the project as bringing the different facets of the community together for the common good.
“This is about bringing the community together because if you think about it, there are a number of different hearts in our community — we’ve got our older population, our young people, Rotary, Lions, council and a heap of other groups,” he said.
“Imagine if we could harness them together and use that power to build the community — that’s what this project is about.”
Mr Sedunary said this initiative would support the Central Goldfields Shire Council-led project Welcome to Central Goldfields, which aims to support local businesses by bringing migrants to the town to support jobs.
Mr Sedunary said the Committee for Maryborough see their project as supporting the Welcome to Central Goldfields project, with the two working hand in hand.
“From the Committee for Maryborough, we see this project as a precursor to the Welcome to Central Goldfields project,” he said.
“None of this works unless we’ve got our community working together.”