Author: Dianty Ningrum - Monash University

Last May, I joined Katrina Szetey and Enayat Moallemi to participate in the Forrest Modelling Workshop as an observer. After more than a year of paused face-to-face interaction in Victoria due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it was nice to finally be able to engage directly with the members of Forrest community.

The workshop had a great attendance of approximately 20 people with quite a diverse composition of gender, age and occupation. A more detailed description of how the workshop was run can be found in this article.

Some of the observations that I had during the workshop is how the community members actively participate during the sessions. The workshop was designed to stimulate active participation from the community members, such as describing their community using posters, followed by a discussion about the points that they have listed in the posters. During the workshop, community members had the opportunity to discuss local community issues that are included in the major community components, such as housing, job opportunities and local economy, ongoing and future infrastructure projects, education, as well as bushfire response.

Aside from the local community components, the workshop’s participants also discussed how their ideas and participation interact with the overall Local SDGs project. They were interested to learn more about the model that they co-develop with Katrina and the other project’s team members, such as how data is gathered and used and how the model will work for the youth in Forrest. During break and after the workshop, community members also had the opportunity to catch up with each other and inform the other members about upcoming events in the community.

Overall, it was a pleasure to join the modelling workshop and to closely watch the Forrest community members’ enthusiasm in building a better, future-proof community.