Castlemaine and Macedon Ranges Safe Spaces have been selected from 14 sites across Australia to be featured in a film that will be the centrepiece of a new digital marketing campaign for community-led Safe Spaces across the country.
A production team from Australia’s national lived experience of suicide organisation, Roses in the Ocean, visited Castlemaine Safe Space last Monday to interview working group members and volunteers.
They then made the trek south to Woodend on Tuesday to capture the Macedon Ranges Safe Space story, before jetting across to Western Australia where they were scheduled to visit the Bridgetown and Bunbury Safe Spaces late last week.
Roses in the Ocean community-led Safe Space project coordinators, Heidi Forbes and Tania Tuckerman, said they aimed to use the film to encourage other communities across Australia to consider submitting an Expressions of Interest to create their own unique community-led Safe Space.
“We are currently welcoming EOIs to support the creation of another six new Safe Spaces across Australia, which would boost our numbers to 20. We currently have a space in every state and territory, aside from the ACT, with sites from Hobart, Adelaide and Western Australia to as far north as Darwin, across to Queensland and New South Wales,” Heidi said.
“We also have culturally specific Tamil and Spanish spaces and a men’s only online space,” she said.
“Each space is unique to its community and through the EOI process we look to undertake community consultation and delve into the needs of each community,” Tania said.
“Castlemaine was one of our first pilots and is a fine example of what can be achieved. Three years since the space was established they have grown to have a 30-strong pool of volunteers and have secured a fantastic welcoming space. The new Woodend space is also thriving,” she said.
Videographer Iain Anderson said that as well as capturing the voice of local Safe Space volunteers they were also sharing a snapshot of each community with drone footage and imagery on each of the four towns.
The team is being accompanied by Australian National University research fellow Scott Fitzpatrick who is gathering information and data about the impact the community-led spaces are having as part of his work with the Lived Experience Research Unit at the Centre for Mental Health Research at ANU.
Keep an eye out for the promo on social media in the coming weeks. The Castlemaine and Woodend Safe Spaces look forward to also sharing their own individual films with the local community.
