‘LIVIN Stong’ program at Kirwan State High School

In it’s second consecutive year, the 8-week LIVIN Strong program has been delivered successfully to the Year 9 sports academy students of Kirwan State High School, in Townsville, North Queensland.  

Throughout the program, students explored topic areas of resilience, teamwork, gratitude, handling setbacks and even undertook the teen mental health first aid training. The overall aim of the program is to equip students with the basic tools that will assist in building life skills which will ultimately help themselves and others throughout life.

“The LIVIN Strong program was designed to give the students the tools and the strategies to be able to look after themselves, and to look after someone else as well. A lot of these areas aren’t learnt in the everyday school curriculum, so this was our chance to give the kids something we weren’t fortunate enough to have growing up ” said LIVIN Co-founder Sam Webb who co-created the program with Fiona Cochrane of Kirwan State High School.

The development of the program has also been overseen and evaluated by lead researcher Dr Amanda Rebar from Central Queensland University.

Through the experienced guidance of our LIVIN facilitator Dan Price, this year the sports academy students of Kirwan State High School participated in our second year of delivering the LIVIN Strong program across several modules including:

• Teen Mental Health First Aid
• Resilience
• Gratitude
• Goal setting
• Communication
• Mental illness
• Coping tools

The LIVIN Strong program took over twelve months to develop with the results of our pilot program being formally evaluated by CQU Lecturer Dr. Amanda Rebar and a team of Psychological Science Students, with the published report on their findings being awarded with the prestigious Social Innovation Opal (Student) Award for Excellence in Engagement. The students who successfully completed the LIVIN Strong program, were all certified in youth mental health first aid with the assistance of Headspace.

Upon conclusion of the evaluations, a research paper will be formally submitted by CQU, which we are thrilled about being a part of. Sam adds, “Evidence base is so important in this day and age, so it is imperative that we are delivering effective content that is in fact making a positive impact on the students lives”.

Click Here to check out the video below produced by the team at Kirwan State High School and if you are interested in having one of our LIVINWell programs presented to your school, community group or workplace, contact our LIVIN head office today.

#ItAintWeakToSpeak