Innovate[ED] Service Partners project

At Innovate[ED] during semester 1, we were offered the choice to take on projects to help the service partners (TeachLearnGrow, Nulsen disability services, Salvation Army, RAFFA, Amana Living, Precious Plastics, and Sustainable Food) or be part of the documentary team for Innovate[ED]. I chose to solve the challenge of creating an ongoing space to connect Fitzroy’s high school students/TLG to other communities so that they can sell their products as a way to encourage children to continue attending school.

Together we generated ideas on areas such as who our target audience is, what platform would reach them effectively, how would we communicate to Fitzroy’s high school and what questions we would ask them. We then decided that we would initially use Runway (All Saints’ online platform store for student products) to sell to our community.

Unfortunately we didn’t receive many replies to our email answering our questions, and with the corona virus 19 pandemic it made communicating with each other even harder. With not much progress happening, when we came back to school, we decided to collaborate with other service partners like Nulsen, RAFFA, Amana Living, and Mens’ Shed. After sending an email offering whether they would like to take our offer and asking questions such as what price they would like their products to be at and the time frame it may take to make those products, we moved onto coming up with ideas for NAIDOC week or the college’s 40th anniversary.

Working in a group of three, together we came up with ideas of what we could do for the 40th anniversary. Combining my teammates’ ideas of the All Saints’ day cookies and takeaway gifts, I came up with the idea of making small dove shaped containers using the precious plastic machines and gifting them to students and staff of the college with the All Saints’ day cookies inside. Together we drafted the size, discussed with Ms Strentz for her expertise on the precious plastic and lazer cutting machines, and started working on the designs which would then lead to testing it with a prototype.

We wanted to offer support to the junior school (kindy – yr6) staff members in the passing of a junior school student so we made origami butterflies attached with a small card. On the card were the words, “Thinking of you – Year 8 and all students in senior school”.

Innovate[ED] semester one has been an exciting time of collaboration, teamwork, problem solving, support, and critical thinking full of challenges throw at us, and we overcame them in our own way.

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