Fully Sick music and craft entertains young and old

MINDFUL of the region’s isolated young and elderly people, Ballarat youth councillor, Brienna Kamp has led a social project to connect and entertain them.

A member of the local SONIKA committee, Ms Kamp launched Fully Sick @ Home kits, distributing 50 just in time for stage three lockdown.

“We were worried about youths out in the country, kids that didn’t have internet and elderly people feeling connected to their community,” she said.

“From the last lockdown, SONIKA had youth facilitated workshops online, from slime making for stress toys, to watercolour workshops, drawing, yoga, and a couple of music lessons, and musical gig videos from the Fully Sick Fest.

“We put together some USBs with the Ballarat Youth Services logo on them and loaded snippets of the best music and workshop videos on every USB. We put any materials needed for those workshops into bags, which we screen-printed ourselves with the Fully Sick Fest logo on them.”

The kits also included Ballarat Community Health’s The Tight Arse Cookbook, gimmicks from Headspace Ballarat, Ballarat Winter Festival colouring-in and puzzles.

Distributing the bags via agencies including the Ballarat and District Aboriginal Cooperative, the YMCA and the Centre for Multicultural Youth, Ms Kamp said packs sent to the elderly have extra messages, to remind them Ballarat’s youth are thinking of them during such a challenging period.

“It’s a pretty personal issue to me. My Poppy was sick last year and had to go into a hospital for the elderly. He hated it,” she said.

“They all seemed so lonely and thought nobody cared, but I wanted them to know that we did care. Poppy was really passionate and sad about that, so in memory of him I wanted to push that.”