Caring for the Cooks River

17/09/2013

SLP is working together with the Cooks River Alliance and UTS Shopfront to develop a website, an integrated communication strategy and educational resources suitable for CALD communities.

The Cooks River Alliance

The Cooks River Alliance was launched in September 2011 by eight councils in the Cooks River Catchment – Ashfield, Bankstown, Canterbury, City of Sydney, Hurstville, Marrickville, Strathfield and Rockdale. The Cooks River is an unique urban waterway located in the inner South-West of Sydney. It runs through some of the most heavily urbanised and industrialised areas in Australia, but many parts of the river and its foreshores offer beautiful riverside walkways and cycle paths, wonderful parks and facilities and an abundance of native flora and fauna. Over recent years, the condition of the river has improved considerably, due in large part to the efforts of these stakeholders and the local community, however it remains a heavily polluted river with much more to be done.

Bike-ride

Given the huge diversity of the community living in these Councils, SLP has been engaged to closely work together with the Alliance and the students in developing the communication materials and resources for this project. It is envisaged that the materials that will be developed, will be used by SLP bilingual educators to engage and educate different CALD communities living in the catchment about how to they can contribute to a more healthy river. In order to get a better idea of the river and the area, the students went on a bike ride along the special cycleway that travels all along the river. They were accompanied by Fieke Geerts (SLP Project Coordinator) and Chris Hudson (Alliance Project Manager) and some other invited speakers that talked about specific parts of the river. It was a beautiful day to ride our bikes, and we had a very informative and wonderfully fun day together! We would like to encourage everyone to explore the area!

Brainstorming game

The bike-ride was followed by a very inspiring brainstorm session run at the Ethnic Communities’ Council by SLP whereby the students, educators and others brainstormed about different ways to engage the community. It was done by playing a 100 minute ‘game’ run by Ele Jansen and Claire Marshall. We had a lot of fun and some great ideas. The game was very helpful to think creatively and come up with new solutions. Thanks Ele and Claire for this great workshop!