Who's that teddy in the window?

AS SOCIAL activity takes a back seat during the coronavirus pandemic, putting a smile on children’s faces was all Lara’s Sal Chadwick wished for when tucking her four-year-old son Aydin into bed at night.

So when Aydin’s kindergarten teacher showed Ms Chadwick a photo of a teddy bear in the front window of a residential home, she wondered how this simple source of joy could be replicated to scale.

Recently unemployed and determined to keep busy, she started a Facebook group “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt! Geelong and Outer Suburbs” to encourage people from Geelong, the Surf Coast and Bellarine to face their stuffed toys towards the street.

Over the course of two days, it exploded beyond her belief.

“Within 48 hours, we had more than 1,078 bears registered, and after three days we had more than 3,000 people register on the page from everywhere,” she said.

Ms Chadwick said people put in their address upon joining the group before being assigned a “bear number”.

From there, the nine-person administration team registers each bear by suburb via a running spreadsheet, which gives bear hunters the street names and numbers of participating homes and businesses.

There’s also plans to create a virtual map of the region’s top 1,000 bears.

“I wanted to find a way to keep children interactive and away from what’s going on,” she said.

“I keep getting all these messages from elderly people who are stuck in their houses and they’re too afraid to go out and they’re saying to me ‘Thank you, I can still hear children outside of my door laughing and saying look, Mummy, there’s a bear; it’s just so sweet.”

But the group is as much about education as it is about spreading positivity during the pandemic.

Ms Chadwick said a growing collective of experts from social workers to childhood educators were frequenting the page to share posts on a range of concerns raised by the outbreak.

“Erin Cotter-Smith, who is an amazing researcher into emergency response and disaster relief, is doing regular updates for everyone on COVID-19.

“There’s a really great resource on there at the moment from clinical psychologist Jackie van der Klooster on talking to your children about the pandemic and why it exists.

“We’ve also got some amazing playgroup teachers and owners of playgroups who are doing musical songs on there for kids to watch.”

The Algerian-born financial planner said the last time she visited her birthplace at age 17, she awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of bombs swirling through the seaside town of Tipaza.

She described it as “the turning point” in her life – a fear-induced moment in which she realised her own happiness would be best achieved by serving others.

“I’ve always been a really strong advocate for mental illness, and I think while being off work I found my calling – and that was to help the community through this time.

“I think the pandemic we’re in now is scary for a lot of people because it may not be something they’ve experienced before, but I think if I can get through a terrorist attack, I can get through anything.”