What is Aboriginal Best Start?

The Aboriginal Best Start Program works to ensure that local Aboriginal communities and organisations are given every possible opportunity to support positive outcomes for their children and families.

Best Start is a prevention and early intervention program that aims to improve the health, development, learning and wellbeing of all Victorian children from conception through to the transition to school.

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Why is Aboriginal Best Start important?

Children do best when they are connected to family and community, have caring relationships, and access to good quality early childhood education and care services. Children who have a strong start in life are more likely to enjoy better health, do well at school and have more opportunities as they grow older.

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How does Aboriginal Best Start work?

The long-term goal of Aboriginal Best Start is to increase early childhood education and maternal child health participation rates and outcomes in East Gippsland.

The facilitator's role is to consult the community and bring together local Aboriginal representatives and lead agencies to form a partnership. The partnerships role is to identify strengths, barriers and opportunities to focus on and work together to address the challenges faced by families and communities.  

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Data dashboard

Each Best Start site has a data dashboard that members of their partnership can access. This data is primarily collected to inform improvement (rather then being collected for judgment or research purposes).

Partnerships use the dashboard data to reflect on their progress and to determine if strategies and ideas should be abandoned, adopted or adapted. This gives them a continuous feedback loop between the strategies and actions they have in place and the data reported through the dashboard.  

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Should my organisation be involved in Aboriginal Best Start?

There are many benefits of being involved with the partnership such as:

• Aligned planning and intervention across organisations for collective impact
• Support of Best Start resources and facilitator to help your organisation implement improvement strategies
• Data dashboard- customisable to display local and systematic data
• Networking and collaboration across communities and services providers.

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What's in it for my community?

• Improved health, development, learning and wellbeing outcomes for children from conception to 8 years
• Strengthening early childhood services and systems across East Gippsland
• Improved early years service participation and engagement for vulnerable children and families.