Victorian Aboriginal Child and Community Agency (VACCA) is a statewide aboriginal community-controlled organization, which helps to deliver health and wellbeing to children, families and community members. Up until 2019, they would hold an in-service training event for their roughly 300 staff, at a local council venue. And then covid came along. A three-year gap ensued. In 2022, they planned to hold the first one post-covid. The issue was their organisation had grown drastically to almost 1,000 employees across 11 office locations since the 2019 event, which posed a logistical challenge as they had never hosted a large-scale event before.
That’s where we came in.
We developed a newly structured event – “VACCA Forum” that would deliver this event at a larger scale. The main driver was to support their staff and make them feel good about the work they do. The idea being to promote cultural inclusion, share achievements and host engaging guest speakers. Given we would have the whole team in one place at one time, they also used this event as an opportunity to deliver their AGM and host an end of year celebration.
Many of the staff had never been to a larger scale event like this as professional delegates. This created some challenges. They had no built-in expectation of how these things worked. We had to provide support and clear messaging in our communications, systems and processes to support this. Additionally, they were from all over the state, so we had to transport and accommodate them as well.
