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Nurturing Hume's environment

Hume City Council is fostering an environmentally aware community. Initiatives like the Nurturing Nature project and the Multicultural Planting Festival are prime examples of the way Hume City Council is working with its community to deal with such environmental challenges as educating and creating awareness about recycling, water conservation and environmentally friendly practices among the community. Both Nurturing Nature and the Multicultural Planting Festival are designed to ensure that Hume’s diverse community works together to protect and enhance Hume’s significant urban and rural areas.

The Nurturing Nature Project aims to teach children environmental responsibility while they are still in their formative years. An original idea of childcare staff at Council’s Roxburgh Park Homestead Family Centre, the project is made up of three parts which includes ‘nurturing’ Hume City’s living creatures, its plant life and its environment. The project started with a green tree frog being introduced to the Centre where children learnt about the lifecycle of tadpoles and frogs and were involved in caring for the animals. This was so successful with children that it inspired Centre staff to look at new initiatives. Children now care for other living creatures including a rabbit and ‘Lizabella’ the bearded dragon. Children are able to handle and feed the animals and learn about their life cycles and what happens in the first few months of the animal’s development. Children also learn about the importance of protecting endangered species.

Nurturing nature also teaches children about how to ‘nurture our plant life’ and educates children that plants are a living thing that need food and water to survive. Children are taught about water consumption, ways to recycle and the recycling of organic matter. Children are also taught the value of planting, growing and harvesting produce through the creation of a vegetable patch.

Michelle Gujer, Team Leader at the Homestead Child and Family Centre said, “The children have really taken up all the recycling and water conservation information and activities that we teach them. It is so rewarding to see the children actively saving and recycling the water they use in their daily activities. A prime example of this is the way children fill up the centre’s watering can with recycled water in order to water the veggie patch and help to conserve our precious water.”

“Nurturing Nature is really becoming well known in the community. Children now bring in recycled materials from home to use in the classroom and tell their friends and parents about what new conservation and recycling initiatives they have learned. The education process has had a ripple effect - extending from the children to their family and friends, with parents visiting the centre more frequently, taking an interest in what their children are learning and what kinds of programs are being offered by staff,” she said.

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