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Life Skills Program

Purpose

This is a pilot program aimed at providing critical support for tenants to improve key environmental health related outcomes. The project targets essential areas including tenants’ rights and responsibilities, access to support services, alleviating overcrowding, requesting repairs and maintenance, home hygiene and DIY-maintenance, budgeting, and consumer rights.

What does the Life Skills program do?

The program is based on community development principles and takes place mainly within the residents’ homes, working with whole households not just individuals. Consideration is given to identifying the life skills issues that limit individual households’ ability to maintaining their housing.

The objectives of the Life Skills project are as follows:

• to improve the living environments of people living in Town Camp communities and public housing;
• to address environmental health problems on Town Camp communities and public housing, from a holistic cultural and physical perspective;
• to improve the overall health and safety of the community;
• to improve the capacity of individuals to fulfill their responsibilities as tenants;
• to extend the life of housing infrastructure on Town Camp communities and public housing;
• to better maintain the internal fabric of houses and home hardware and reduce the amount of repairs and maintenance required by houses in Town Camp communities and public housing;
• to promote client ownership and control of their health and housing environments through involvement in the development and implementation of the project;
• to trial and evaluate innovative strategies and approaches towards environmental health issues and thus gain knowledge about best practice in implementing environmental health programs that can be applied in other contexts throughout Australia.