Nomination for Local Council Elections Did you know that you can nominate for a position on council regardless of qualifications, religion, race, gender, experience or profession? In fact, councils encourage nominations by people from diverse backgrounds to ensure that a wide range of views are being represented. Nominations for council elections open Tuesday 4 September and close 12noon Tuesday 18 September 2018. In South Australia there are around 700 council members who are as diverse as the reasons that motivated them to stand for election. The Local Government Association of South Australia has detailed information about the nomination process.
Community Visitors Scheme For the last few decades, the MCCSA Community Visitor Scheme (CVS) has been run to enhance the mental wellbeing of elderly people with multicultural backgrounds living in aged care homes. The generosity of our volunteers sharing their precious time and warmth has been a present for isolated and lonely people, creating new energy and happiness for them. 106 residents were regularly visited during the last financial year, and our volunteers greatly helped the residents to feel warmth in their lives. The MCCSA CVS team support our volunteers in achieving this, by providing information on dementia, grief and loss, residents' wellbeing, first aid training, fire hazards around the home and residential homes and etc. through support meetings. On the 24th of August, we had a great training session with a mental health social worker currently working with elderly people
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living in residential homes. In this session, CVS volunteers learnt important information that they need to be aware of when visiting multicultural elderly people. This helps to improve the quality of life for residents visited by MCCSA volunteers. The MCCSA Community Visitors Scheme is a wonderful project, which is a treasure to people with multicultural backgrounds living in aged care homes. At present, we are looking for volunteers who can speak the following languages: Bosnian, Bulgarian, Cantonese, Czech, Croatian, Farsi, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Russian, Scottish, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Turkish, Ukrainian or Vietnamese. For further information, contact either Heeyoung, our CVS Coordinator on 8213 4604 or email her at heeyoung.lim@mccsa.org.au or Kristin.johansson@mccsa.org.au (Manager Projects).