Cobram Secondary College is one of eight Moira Shire Schools who partnered with Uniting; Moira Shire Council, SalvoCare and Berry St to bring the Award winning Live4Life initiative to the Moira community.

 

Live4Life is about empowering rural Victorian communities to support, improve and invest in young people’s mental health and wellbeing, it is a whole of community approach to youth mental health and youth suicide prevention. The Live4Life model is currently being delivered in six rural Local Government areas: Baw Baw; Benalla; Glenelg; Macedon Ranges; Southern Grampians and here in Moira!

 

A component of this work is the delivery of evidence based mental health education to students and to the community.

​

We have been very excited to finally be delivering Teen Mental Health First Aid to our Year 8 & 11 students here at Cobram Secondary.

We have some fantastic local Instructors from DET, headspace, Salvocare and Uniting who are going to be delivering our Training and at the same time galvanizing students’ knowledge of helpful services and resources that exist locally.

 

Teen MHFA Course will teach our Year 8 and Year 11 students how to provide mental health first aid to their friends. An important part of the training is understanding how to recognise when a friend isn’t tracking so well with their mental health, how to have important conversations and most importantly, how to engage a responsible and trusted adult, when needed, to ensure a young person gets the help they most need as quickly as possible.

 

We have had some great feedback already received from participants who have said that the training is “very helpful” “totally worth it” and “we learnt a lot”.

 

The TMHFA course was developed by Mental Health First Aid Australian and Melbourne University in response to research indicating that young people prefer and are more likely to share problems they are experiencing with peers.

 

The course curriculum is evidence-based, informed by a study undertaken to determine the best actions a young person can undertake to support a peer with a mental health problem. 

 

Youth Live4Life has also done extensive research on the effectiveness of the model in two other rural communities of Benalla and Glenelg Shire. You can read more about that here:

http://www.live4life.org.au/research/

 

The focus of training is to build people’s confidence around mental health literacy and to encourage help seeking and support.
 

The Live4Life model also has a strong youth participation component and we invite Year 8 students at the end of their first Live4Life Year to join the Live4Life Crew.  These students become champions of positive mental health messages and activities in the local community.

 

At Cobram Secondary College we will run this program with all Year 8 students and all Year 11 students annually to ensure our students are equipped with the skills needed to help their friends when they are in need.

​

For more information on Live4Life click on the button below

​

​

​

​

24/7 HELPLINES

​

​

​

​

​

​

​