Indigenous Children’s Hygiene Initiative
The foundations Indigenous Children’s Hygiene Initiative is a joint initiative. Through our children joining with other children globally they will have one united voice that will be heard around the world. One of the first initiatives of our children will be to influence health within their communities through encouraging all to wash their hands and faces.
Our children will influence governments through You Tube campaigns and engaging with the media as they are the face and the voice of the foundation.
As adults, parents and guardians we need to support and encourage them to be part of this global initiative through having their heros in sport, song, dance, theatre and television send in to the foundation mobile video phone messages of encouragement. These messages will go out to all children through the website.
If you wish to send a message just record it on video on your phone and send it to the foundation via email on firstname.lastname@example.org
Messages should say something along the lines of:-
About our co-founder Auntie Carol Petterson:-
Auntie Carol Petterson’s vision is to see that the aboriginal people be empowered to bring about changes in their own communities. The Australian Indigenous Children’s Initiative is about empowering indigenous children to influence hygiene outcomes in their own communities.
Carol is a Noongar/Ngadu woman from the south-east coast of Western Australia. She has lived and worked in Albany for most of her life, and is well-known throughout the Noongar nation as a tireless worker for her people.
She has been very active in Indigenous affairs for over 40 years.
Carol was a principal adviser to the Premier of Western Australia on women´s issues, and has been appointed to many state and Commonwealth committees and boards covering issues such as Indigenous health, welfare, education and training.
Carol was a councillor with the local Shire Council of Albany, and such, is the respect she gained during her term, a chamber room in the Council was named after her.
Although officially retired, she is still very involved as a cultural spokesperson working alongside mining companies such as BHP Billiton, advising on long-term economic development and sustainability for traditional owners.
She is very passionate about Aboriginal education and has been chair of the South West Aboriginal Education Committee for over five years. Carol is involved in local primary schools doing cross-cultural workshops and liaising with teachers, parents and students to access the best possible opportunities for Noongar youth.
At Mt Lockyer Primary School, which has a high proportion of Noongar students, Carol has helped to establish an outdoor learning centre encouraging and supporting young people to embrace and be proud of their Aboriginality.
Family has always been an important focus for Carol. She is the third of 18 children and one of 10 girls. Carol says she helped raise her younger siblings from the age of eight and learnt from that early start to become a leader to make do with meagre resources.
Carol has five grown children, 13 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren – “all absolutely adorable” she says, and all imbued with the same family-based values that have guided her life.
A wonderfully gracious lady, Carol is an inspirational leader and role model in the Noongar community and indeed the wider community. She has touched – and continues to touch – many people´s lives.
As one observer commented, if there´s one thing in life Carol has failed at, it´s retirement.
The Indigenous Hygiene Initiative is one that is going to be an initiative of each individual indigenous group or community who wish to join with the foundation and undertake a hygiene program. The communities will own and drive the initiative themselves.
The program will be the same concept with the children becoming the hygiene guardians for their family and the community.
They will take this storyline of the GrimeStoppers and give to a local indigenous story writer and have it changed to speak of how it may come about in the culture of the community.
It is then narrated by an elder who has authority to be a story teller on radio. The story will go on for several months until an the production of the APP is which is developed by the community with guidance from the foundation is released into the community. Wherever possible local indigenous people will be engaged to work with the foundation.
Hopefully through the story’s over the radio the children will want to become GrimeStoppers or an equivalent indigenous name. This is part of how the program will work.
We will work with all communities in this way that want to use the initiative to improve hand hygiene in their community.