Bernadette O'Connor and Craig Randazzo -- challenging the "stark reality" of learning ability and life expectancy

Bernadette O’Connor, who’s just taken over as CEO of the Central West Community College in Orange, has been working in the not-for-profit education, training and employment sector for the past 25 years.

And she says that once she got into the business, after growing up on a dairy farm, she found it connected her so closely to the community that “I’ve never since quite managed to extricate myself.”

It’s this strong, fundamental human connection, dealing with education, training and work problems at the base of society, among the more challenged and disadvantaged people who linger in the wake of community progress, that she and the Community College are all about.

And the diversity and dedication of Barnadette’s career reflects, and fits perfectly with, the amazingly wide range of services and programs that the college offers – to disengaged youth, to the untrained and unemployed, to companies that need employees, to indigenous people, to whole communities that are in a state of crisis and need help to rebuild.

Among her career laurels has been a forefront role in the development of VET (Vocational Education and Training) in Victoria, membership of the Community Colleges Australia Board, a director of Job Futures and co-authorship of several publications for the not-for-profit, community and training sectors.

Her more recent job before this new position shows one dramatic example of the extent to which the community college system involves itself in community affairs — the disastrous Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria in January 2009, when 108 people lost their lives.

Bernadette, who  was working as CEO of the Gippsland Community College at that time, recalls how in the wake of the fire, in the rebuilding program that took place, the college was able to help the homeless victims build new houses and find “sustainable employment” – the two most critical needs of the moment.

She sees that experience as one of many that have helped her “to continue to grow and develop” in the non-profit training sector but, as she says:  “In many ways I’m only at the start of what’s really possible – recognising the huge capacity of the community college service to leverage mutually supportive relationships between individuals, business and community groups.”

“SOCIAL INCLUSION” PROGRAMS FOR THE DISADVANTAGED

"Social Inclusion" -- getting kids into jobs

That capacity, as described by the college’s deputy CEO, Craig Randazzo, began in the early 1980s when the college first began offering adult education programs.

From 2007 it began fusing this with what he calls “social inclusion” initiatives targeting the entrenched disadvantaged, the long-term unemployed, disengaged schoolchildren, those with low attainment problems and sidelined indigenous people.

“We now have no less than seven different business areas covering aspects of this social inclusion program,” Craig says.”They deal with employment, training, apprenticeships and community support – all aimed at helping people grow and develop and transition into employment.”

To do this, the college employs almost 200 experienced staff, trainers and assessors and has a network of 23 offices throughout the Central West and other regions of NSW.

So, far from being what many people might imagine the college to be – an adult education institute with a curriculum not unlike that of Orange’s University of the Third Age – the Community College takes people, mostly the young, from the bottom steps of the social ladder and helps them get a firm footing in the mainstream.

As Bernadette sees it, one of the basic hurdles the college tackles is the “stark reality of the relationship between learning ability and life expectancy for disadvantaged schookids “ – expectancy not simply in terms of years, but what a young person stuck behind the eight ball of education can expect the value of their life to be.

Says Craig: “We have the ability to change peoples’ lives.” And the college has two programs running at the moment which he describes as engaging “kids for whom the current school environment doesn’t work.”

In other words, it’s not just that they don’t go to school but that they’ve fallen down the “hole” in the academically-oriented education system that Orange City Councillor Fiona Rossiter refers to in our currently running  ONN News Feature “Youth in Orange.”

“The mechanics change when they come to this college,” he says. “And change can be a catalyst for different behaviour. For one thing, they’re treated like adults. And, rather than big classrooms, the learning groups here are usually eight to 12 students.

“We find that the mainstream of society will always deal with the mainstream, and its resources and structures are not available to deliver to certain groups of youth.

“We see it as highly important to re-engage these kids – bring them back into the mainstream.”

Says Bernadette: “We look for what they can do, not what they can’t do. For optimum ability in whatever interest or ability they have.”

TEACHING EMPLOYERS — BROADEN THE SEARCH FOR WORKERS

Apprenticeships and on-job training -- funding and benefits for employers

But while the disadvantaged are being tutored and mentored for jobs and apprenticeships, the college also deals first-hand with local employers, teaching them as well — how to look for and find the right employees and recognise community responsibility at the same time.

“There’s a skills squeeze right through our region at the moment – businesses hungry for the right workers,” says Craig Randazzio. “We show them how to broaden their approach and look at the disadvantaged young people who we’re preparing for jobs and apprenticeships.

“In fact, just as we’re training the disadvantaged we’re training the big companies too – teaching them that by employing these kids as ‘trainees’ instead of just workers they can  be exposed through us to all sorts of funding for teaching them skills and qualifications on the job, and the benefits of some 900 federally run programs that we reach across.

“We can advise them that employees who’ve been training by a company will stay with it 25 percent longer than others. And of course, the trained worker will have more interest and dedication towards the job, and a vital sense of belonging.”

Once a company has invested in the college’s training approach, it will usually learn to observe another vital college commitment, Craig points out – employing indigenous workers.

THE “YIN AND YANG” OF EDUCATION AND EMPLOYMENT

The Orange Community College is certainly a big surprise to anyone who might think of it as dressmaking, crafts and cooking classes. It vigorously fills a need in our society to educate people for an independent self-respecting working life – the people who society rushes dispassionately by.

Bernadette O’Connor sees a vital yin-yang relationship between the college’s two prime goals – education and employment, each integrated with and supporting the other. “They go hand in hand,” she says. And the results are both satisfying and inspiring.

“It’s an exciting environment to work in – we stand across so many aspects of community service,” she says.

“We create what we call a ‘deep lattice” or 3D network in which the company owner they we’ve helped provide employees for is also potentially a parent, or a son or daughter, or perhaps a Rotarian or a community volunteer, interlocking with the complex network of people we touch and who touch each other.

“The real excitement comes when you stand at a graduation ceremony and witness the achievements of people who have developed skills they never knew they had.

“Their success spills over from them to the rest of their family, their neighbours and their community.”