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  • Andrew Stocker
  • Pauline Johnston
  • Michelle Gibson
  • Max Colebourn
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Pauline:

My name is Pauline Johnstone, I work at La Trobe Lifeskills as the coordinator for accredited programs. La Trobe Lifeskills is a day program for young people with an intellectual disability. They come to La Trobe Lifeskills to increase their ability to become independent, so, to learn skills that enable them to be in the community and live more independently. They come for recreational purposes - we have a huge sport and leisure or recreation program, a well as music, art and accredited subjects.

Lifeskills vision is to provide day programs to young people living with an intellectual disability, to enable them to participate more fully in community life. La Trobe Lifeskills is a registered training organisation and so it offers a full gamut of accredited courses, there’s the Certificate One in Work Education and Transition Education. We have recently added to our scope the Certificate Two in Hospitality where our participants can come along and have actual vocational placement so, real life on the job experience in our own café here.

We also offer accredited subjects in music where again the students are very enthusiastic about learning recording skills, how to make their own music DVD’s, how to work in a studio setting. Currently we are involved in a range of activities that involve working for the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, where our art students have been working on making pots and sculptures for the emergency entrance way. Also, our participants are involved in the car wash here, so we have a very vibrant car wash on a Thursday.

Daniel De Colle:

As you can see here we wash and vacuum cars and yeah, it’s excellent. For a first year like me I have really made a lot of friends and I get to know them well.

Pauline:

Participants are very, very, very busy with the cars from the staff and students here at La Trobe University. The sport and rec program is very, very, very popular. We seem to have an inordinate amount of people that love the basketball. We also run the tool hire business, where we have programs there for restoration of furniture, garden furniture, indoor furniture, also a bike maintenance program. We have had a lot of people come in recently that are having their bikes fixed by participants in the tool hire.

Lifeskills would like to become more involved with La Trobe University, particularly through our vocational placement program. We feel that there are many jobs around the University that our participants could be involved in such as mail room jobs, filing jobs, jobs in the garden and we are very keen to have a bigger relationship or a greater relationship with some of the departments that may find our services of use. So if anybody is interested in becoming involved in that vocational placement program or work experience program then they should contact me, Pauline Johnstone at 9479 1474, and I will be happy to talk to them more about it.