Warrnambool-Moyne – driving change for young people

A year ago, the Warrnambool-Moyne CIC set a goal of improving transport and mobility within the community. Through community collaboration and co-design, they have secured a driving simulator to help young people get their licence! We sat down with our partners from Brophy, Matilda and Ben to learn how they found multiple angles to attack the problem, harnessed the power of the entire CIC’s community connections, and what they learnt along the way.

Identifying what you want to change

Matilda was ‘pretty fresh’ to the committee when transport first came up, but she knew a lot of her peers had trouble getting a learners permit and drivers licenses.

Members of the CIC started talking about the lack of transport as a barrier young people face getting into work – including how difficult it is to get a drivers’ license with the required 120 hours of supervised driving – it quickly became clear that the issue was widely felt across the community.

‘We heard it from all directions, employment, service providers, teachers, parents, carers, non-for-profit workers… employers trying to get staff, saying ‘they can’t do it because this young person can’t drive there’ explains.

‘Having a licence is a real integral part of being able to hold employment, and the Warrnambool employment landscape is very regional.’

Something else kept coming up as well –  mental health. Anxiety was preventing a lot of young people from even considering getting in the car for the first time.

‘I think there’s more knowledge around providing support for young people and their readiness for things in general right now.’ – Matilda

‘I think I Covid potentially exacerbated those anxieties and made them a lot more visible.’ – Ben

Exploring solutions

Inspiration came from brainstorming together as a committee and looking at what projects had been successful in applying for local transport funding.

 ‘The Department wanted to come down and talk to us about some of the stuff that we’d been investigating, and were able to say, “that could be a possibility” or “that’s out of the realm of possibility.” We had a look at what other organisations had been successful in getting funding for and thought about something that would fit to our community as well.’ – Ben

But time on the simulator doesn’t count towards the 120 hours young people need to log to get their licence, so they still needed to address how young people could get real experience driving on the road. 

The CIC also worked on reinvigorating the local L2P Learner Driver Mentor Program which was run by the council, after many volunteers had dropped off during Covid-19 restrictions.

“The program had a long waiting list of young people who were becoming disheartened because the wait was so long.” – Matilda

Matilda co-designed a recruitment video with local young people who were interested in working in media production which gave them valuable skills and experience and an opportunity to discuss career pathways with the filmmaker they hired to produce it with them. Driving instructors, existing volunteer mentors and young people on the waiting list starred in a short video explaining why it was important and what was involved, inviting new mentors to volunteer.

CIC member Beyond the Bell, a local non-profit youth service, consulted with their youth reference group about the CIC’s ideas, and the group supported the decision to allocate funding towards it.

Gathering evidence as a CIC

Different organisations on the CIC were able to get data that helped prove what everyone on the committee already knew to be true from their lived expertise.

TAFE were able to show that 75% of the inquiries they got from postcodes around Framlingham didn’t result in enrolment, and most of those people nominated ‘transport and access’ as their reason in feedback forms.

Employment services were able to say how many of the young people they worked with didn’t have a learners permit or driver’s license. Together they built the case for funding the solutions they wanted to try.

Lesson learnt: ‘Not cross-contamination – cross-pollination!’ Sow the seeds of support on other committees to cultivate community buy-in

Some CIC members sat on other local committees, where they gave updates on their driving simulator initiative along the way. Others were interested and excited about the simulator, and that meant help was nearby when concerns about funding arose.

‘We sat on that a while. Eventually, I went to the CIC. I wasn’t pleading, but I said “we are basically $4000 short of being able to see this to fruition.” And then one of the employment services providers in the room, went back and spoke to their organisation. And they said “We’ll find the rest of it. We want this to happen.” They’ll be one of the big users of the simulator, and they have their logo on the certificate when you complete the simulator training. That’s where the CIC’s really good, creating those relationships, someone usually puts their hand up.’ – BEN

On top of tapping into community connections for funding, the CIC got the new Warrnambool City Library to support by hosting the driving simulator in their maker’s space – a dedicated community technology lab. They’ve since trained staff and some of the CIC members as ‘cockpit champions’ that can assist people to use the simulator.

Lesson learnt: Co-design means testing, evolving and problem solving along the way

‘[We] put on a feed and asked them to play around on it and give us feedback. They said the library was a good place to have it, and they liked that it would be on the same booking system as all the other techy stuff they have there. They also provided feedback to say that it needed to be professionally mounted on a unit, it couldn’t be a mobile thing because the steering wheel moved around too much.’ – Ben

Lesson learnt: If it’s too much, focus your energy on where you can have the most impact.

When the CIC members first started discussing the barriers to young people finding employment, they’d thought of two issues unique to Warrnambool’s regional jobs landscape: transport and accommodation.

‘We decided that in our CIC meetings, we didn’t have enough time to look at those things in isolation. So, we decided to form two working groups – a transport mobility working group and an accommodation working group.’ – Matilda

‘We ran them side by side for three or four months. It was too much to organise chairing two extra meetings on top of the CIC. So, we decided as a group to focus on transport, because we thought we could have potentially a bigger impact in that area as a CIC.’ – Ben

What’s on the horizon:

In addition to the driving simulator, Brophy Youth and Family services have taken over running the L2P mentor driving program and CIC members continue to promote the L2P volunteer driving mentor role to increase recruitment.

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