Building Life Skills is about supporting people to gain confidence and take control of their own lives. Examples of activities in the program include cooking and healthy eating, setting budgets, shopping, travelling independently and the ‘Healthy Friendships’ course.
Chelsea is focusing on building life skills through her cooking and community access programs at the Hub and socialising and customer service at Christabelles.Chelsea likes working at Christabelles the most because it’s fun.
“I help the customers, do the cash register and the card thing,” she says.
“I used to find the card thing (the EFTPOS system) hard but I got used to it as Sharyn helped me and I am doing it better now.”
She likes coming to Merrimu now as she says the staff are happy and help her. She is proud that she has reached a lot of her goals.
One goal was making friends and she has made lots of new ones.
Other goals were to develop skills that would help her in getting work in a workplace.
“I’ve learned lots of skills at Christabelles. I find the cleaning and moving everything if we have some new stock easy but the card thing hard.”
Chelsea is not sure what she wants to do in the future. “I want to stay at Christabelles until I get more confident and learn lots of new things.”
This story is from our 2015 Annual Report. You can read more on our Publications page.