Leaders: Ralph Barba taught the students everything they need to know about podcasting and headspace echuca’s community engagement officer Jayden Howe organised the overall project. Photos: Aidan Briggs
Photo by
Aidan Briggs
headspace is giving an important voice to local teenagers as the organisation works with school students to create a podcast series on various topics.
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What started as a smaller project last year with just one school has now grown to include Kyabram P-12, St Joseph’s College, Twin Rivers Specialist School, Echuca College, Rochester Secondary College and St Augustine’s College.
headspace Echuca’s community engagement officer Jayden Howe, who organised the project, said it was great to see the kids engage with the topics.
“(On Tuesday) at the end of the day, we had a peer chat with a group of girls around body image,” he said.
“The way they spoke about the topic and how it impacts not just young females, but everyone in the younger and older cohorts was just incredible.”
Special moment: Jayden Howe and Ralph Barba said it was great to work with the students and to see their confidence grow over the day.
Photo by
Aidan Briggs
Each day, a group of students comes to headspace and spends the morning learning the basics of podcasting. Then, after lunch, they interview someone from the community about a particular topic for a podcast episode.
The topics covered are bullying, body image, cyber safety, vaping, supporting friends and family, and anxiety and depression.
“Each year, we do an annual implementation plan, and it shows us the top topics for young people coming to seek support. The topics we chose are the ones where we’ve noticed a bit of a trend,” Mr Howe said.
“We thought it’d be interesting to do an educational project like this to support those topics. Often, it’s even more powerful to hear from someone your own age rather than someone like myself.
“Although each school is only doing one topic, this will become a community resource. I don’t think there’s been a project within the area that’s probably touched all those schools from this sort of mental health stance.”
Mr Howe said he knew including schools from across the region was essential.
“As a mental health facility, we cover Kyabram, we cover Rochy, we cover Cohuna. If we can’t go to them with a clinician, I think getting out to them as a community engagement officer is vital,” he said.
“A project like this really supports that. So having the two Kyabram schools come over has been really cool.”
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