Well I became involved in GROW through my manager […], with my role being I suppose … around employment and training opportunities and the Department of Justice and Community Safety already working with GROW, she thought it would be [of] benefit to work with [Liz Everist, GROW backbone] and from there it has grown into something pretty huge. In terms of my role, I came into a role that was completely new so there was a PD with expected outcomes – which was to source employment training and education opportunities for offenders with community work on their orders, but without that initial link with GROW I wouldn’t have been able to do my job, the opportunity to sit in on forums and groups.
The change I see is that the Department is much more integrated into services in the community. The Department was always seen as being remote from community and concentrating on our core business. We did our job as case managers to look after clients, but that interaction with the community wasn’t there. GROW was where I met all these wonderful people and found out about Jobs Vic and Jobactives and Diversitat […]
We are very unique in Geelong (and Colac) because of GROW, we are all working toward the same outcomes. GROW brings everyone together and brings the right people. What this has meant now is that I can take all of these contacts and everything that GROW is doing in the community and I can take that back and I can involve our case managers. So we have better opportunities for our offenders. So that is why the programs I have set up in BSW through the connections with GROW – these are now considered as benchmark by the Department – what I am doing is working with the contacts I have met through GROW, we all have the same clients, it has enabled us to link our offender cohort to link them to the right employment and training supports to help them. These are services that understand that cohort – it’s not easy for these clients, they have so much going on in their lives, they need wrap around and ongoing support. None of this fluffy stuff – what these groups of people are doing who are linked to GROW – it is honest down to earth stuff, not making promises that can’t be kept. These clients have been kicked down so many times, you need to build trust. With these groups we are meeting the needs of the community.
What is a Most Significant Change story?
The Most Significant Change (MSC) technique is a form of monitoring and evaluation that involves the collection of significant change stories across the GROW collective. This MSC story was collected as part of the GROW Review, where a total of 35 stories were collected. Participants at a Summit Workshop in February 2019 were asked to select the story that had the most significant for them. This story was selected by participants at the Summit workshop because:
‘It highlights the relationships between parts (via GROW), and how they enable systems change’
