October was a very busy month, for us at Live Well Tasmania: we had our Community Centre Open Day, a stand at the Tulip Festival, and our Community Farm Open Day. All three of them went well very well, with great attendances at both our Open Day’s. The weather gods were on our side with good weather for all three events. We were blessed to have Hannah Moloney help out with the making of a video for our Community Based Income project while she was in the North-West as Ambassador for the Tulip Festival.

Two of our projects, Healthy and Thriving Wynyard, and Community Mondays are due to conclude in December, but our Care Farming project is starting mid November, thanks to support from the Tasmanian Government. We have already had interest in the project, but welcome more expressions of interest to participate. We have also been gathering idea’s for an Art Trail along our bush walking tracks, we welcome further idea’s for the Trail.  

Sustainability has been a theme this month, including a discussion at the Tulip Festival about food security. Food security is not only concerned with how people can put food on the table, it is also concerned with how we preserve our agricultural land to be able to produce quality, nutritious food into the future. Climate change is one of the biggest threats to food production, and the ‘big end of town’ as yet has not made much inroads into the scale of change that needs to happen: we have a lot of scope however in our communities to model sustainable behaviours, including growing food by working together. This is not only a good insurance policy if the larger scale food systems deteriorate, it is also a great to build community to then work on others issues such as problematic levels of mental illhealth.

The recent story of increased attendance of school kids due to the provision of a school lunch is one example of the way food can provide motivation. We continue however to prioritise our relationships with each other as the foundation of all human endeavours. Having supportive social relationships is both crucial for individual health and wellbeing, and is also crucial for the collaboration we need to address the many issues making life difficult at the moment.

At our Open Day at our Oldina Community Farm we had two great talks related to sustainability, the first from Rees Campbell on Tasmanian edible plants. These plants of course are very well adapted to Tasmanian conditions, so don’t need the pampering that exotic plants need. The second talk was from Cheryl Durrant on disaster preparedness, such as what to pack in your ‘stay bag’, for example if the power goes out and you are confined to your house, and your ‘go bag’, for if you need to evacuate such as for floods or bushfires. We are already seeing increased numbers of these events occuring, and they are predicted to increase further in the near future, so it is important to be prepared.

We also thank the Social Activation Panel for attending a lunch recently, see the report below about what the SAP team have been up to, including visits to the Lobster Ponds, helping Squid Inc. with their productions, and helping out at the ROC Food Hub.