A pioneering early years initiative in the Wimmera is looking to expand its suite of services after recent investment from the Victorian government.
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The ByFive Innovation and Equity Hub, responsible for facilitating several key early years research projects in the region, has received a $2.8 million investment from the Victorian government to continue its work.
The funding, which will be spread across four years, will allow ByFive to transition to a community-facilitated project and further leverage its relationship with the Murdoch Children's Research Institute and Royal Children's Hospital.
ByFive independent chair Emma Vogel said this would allow the group to expand into areas such as early primary school.
"It is really an extension of the original ByFive project. The innovation hub is really adding onto the foundational work that the original ByFive project set up. It is working complementary with the funding we got from the Strengthening Care For Children pilot," she said.
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"ByFive are very focused on pre-school. The innovation hub will probably take that up a level or two, so we are now moving to the early years of primary school as well."
ByFive started as a partnership between the Wimmera Development Association, the Wimmera Southern Mallee Regional Partnership, the Centre for Community Child Health at the Royal Melbourne Hospital and the Murdoch Children's Research Institute.
It was created after many in the Wimmera identified a need to improve early years service delivery in communities that are often small and dispersed.
The group focuses its efforts on the six local government areas of Horsham, Northern Grampians, Yarriambiack, Hindmarsh, Buloke and West Wimmera.
One of the flagship programs of ByFive was the Strengthening Care for Children program, which established partnerships between pediatric specialists, local professionals and families to improve the health and wellbeing of young people.
Ms Vogel said the program, and others conducted by ByFive, would form the basis for the next four years of work in the early years' sector.
"The Strengthening Care for Children project came out of the original ByFive, it started with a small trial and snowballed into a large trial that ended up with its own funding stream," she said.
"We also did a big project on continuity of early learning, where we put 160 people through a professional development course. Working together across sectors.
"The next phase of ByFive will really be building on those things that we identified as opportunities in the original ByFive and we will be able to flesh those out and start trialing some more pilot projects across the region."
Ms Vogel said the reinvestment in the ByFive Innovation Hub will also create three new jobs for the group.
"We have thee people employed at the moment across the region. We will be looking for an executive officer in the near future, as well as two positions to be filled in the coming months," she said.
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Ms Vogel said ByFive's unique form of community participation and grassroots advocacy had already garnered national attention in the early years sector.
"ByFive has demonstrated a small, well-targeted investment from the government can unlock an enormous sleeping giant, the power of people in local communities to identify and resolve their own issues," she said.
"People in their community, they know what the problems are and if they get the professional advice to help solve them you get a much more sustainable outcome. I think ByFive really proved to a lot of people that the model is very effective.
"Within the sector they are always blown away by the knowledge, passion and talent of people in the Wimmera. How they go beyond the call of duty."
For more information, visit rdv.vic.gov.au/regional-partnerships/wimmera-southern-mallee.
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