Jo Rock, Principal

Benalla is a rural town in North East Victoria that has had its fair share of adolescent and youth suicides over the years. In late 2016 the Benalla Rural City Council, FCJ College and Benalla P -12 College put together a joint submission for Live4Life’s school/community model to be rolled out in our community. We were keen to get on board, as we knew this program showed how a highly successful school and community partnership, engaging local Council, schools and community organisations with suicide prevention as its core purpose was impacting positively on the mental health outcomes of young people in the Macedon Ranges area. We were ecstatic to be one of the successful submissions and commenced planning the program, and the selection and training of the facilitators in preparation for the program to roll out in 2017.

2019 is our third year of delivering the Live4Life program, which sees the Teen Mental Health First Aid being explicitly taught to our Year 8 and 11 students. We have seen the willingness of our young people to open up and talk around the topic of mental health, and a definite increase in help-seeking behaviour; for themselves and their friends. Students now have the language and ability to talk about mental health issues that are impacting on those around them and they know where and how to seek help. We have also been able to train staff and parents on Youth Mental Health, which has enabled conversations between our young people and their parents to be informed and somewhat easier to enter into. Students in Year 9 facilitate the launch and the celebration events that bookend the program, and they themselves are actively engaging further with the program content.

We will continue to prioritise this program in our school as we believe it is providing our young people with accurate, age appropriate content that they can refer back to and build on over their time at FCJ College.