An open day at Vivid’s Kyabram site was the organisation’s chance to reintroduce itself to the community.
Vivid Kyabram, located on Albion St and across from the IGA, is a support service that brings people with disabilities together and creates a habitat for them to foster friendship and connection with one another.
The Kyabram site is one of many across northern Victoria that supports around 250 adults with intellectual disabilities stay independent while still embedded in their own community.
At the moment Vivid Kyabram has five clients a day; but the disability support service is looking to double that number.
The hope is to expand its client list in order to make programs more viable and cost effective.
But in order to bring on board more clients, Vivid Kyabram needed to promote itself to the wider community — which is why the service held a community open day on Monday, August 26, to gauge interest.
In June, St Augustine’s College wrapped up a 10-week project called Youth Take Over which aimed at promoting Vivid Kyabram to the community.
During the project, students distributed a survey to the community which garnered 95 responses and found that 30 per cent of the community had zero knowledge of Vivid Kyabram or its activities.
Vivid business manager Sue Green said the survey produced by the students of St Augustine’s helped the organisation understand what needs to be done to get the word out about Vivid.
“Part of the survey came about that the kids laid out was that there’s probably a good amount of people in (Kyabram) that don’t know who we are and what we do,” she said.
“We want to say, with today, that we are here, and we’re local and we’re all about trying to get people embedded in the local community and get involved in activities in the local community.”
Ms Green said it was especially important for Kyabram to have a site in order to support those in neighbouring communities that may feel isolated or have little disability support.
“If you actually live here, or live near, you need to be a part of the community,” she said.
“You need to be able to walk down the street of your own town and be able to receive the support you deserve.
“You’ve probably got a heap of people feeling that they’ve got to go over to Shepparton, or Echuca or get services in Bendigo — and that would be costing them a lot of money.”
In addition to providing support services, the Kyabram site operates a boutique shop that sells goods created by clients through craft sessions.
It sells a variety of different home decorations such as bird boxes, garden accessories, personalised wine glasses and seed bags.
Support worker Dave Wells said as the community does not know what Vivid does, the shop does not get many customers.
“A lot of people say ‘Hey, I didn’t even know that the shop is there,’ and I understand that because we’re not really putting ourselves out there,” Mr Wells said.
He said hopefully the open day not only showcases the services that Vivid offers, but also the shop to hopefully get a few more customers through the door.
Over the day, a few potential clients trickled in to have a chat to any of the support workers or any current clients who divulged what the organisation was like.
Both Mr Wells and Ms Green said they hoped to hold another open day before the end of the year for Vivid Kyabram in order to expand its clientship to make programs more viable.