MENTAL HEALTH AND WELL-BEING

Headspace have put together some information about COVID-19 including how to maintain a healthy headspace during this time and a list of support services.  Details are available in the links below

Families are reminded that they can contact the College Counsellor Joanna Orchard if they have any concerns joanna.orchard@catholic.tas.edu.au

FROM THE ENVIRONMENTAL & SUSTAINABILITY OFFICER 

SUSTAINABILITY AT HOME

We are in a period of uncertainty, anxiety and confusion. How do we continue to support each other and stay productive whilst continuing to stay safe?
How do we make good decisions and continue to care for our earth and each other?
At St Aloysius Catholic College we still continue to seek opportunities to work on sustainability within our community. Every fortnight we will share ideas which we can all use at home to do some good and reset daily habits to be more sustainable. Share this with your family and friends, get everyone involved!

You are already having a massive impact on your carbon footprint. Working from home greatly reduces the amount of commuting we do. The idea of commuting to work is very much a 19th century idea, reinforced by car companies who promote it as a sense of freedom. Zoom, Google hangouts and multiple other video-conferencing services have made the idea of working from home a reality. An affordable way of communicating, with over 100 people being able to participate at any time. Maybe after all of this is over, working from home will become a normal way of life for some people.

PLAN TO SHOP SUSTAINABLY

There is a lot of concern and anxiety around going grocery shopping at the moment. During lock downs in other countries, residents are worried about travelling to the shops with a list, and after arriving, finding nothing on the shelves. The act of shopping in Australia is a weekly or even daily habit, which has now turned into the exhausting task of having to have an awareness of other people’s movements, coughing, sneezing, what they are touching while also ensuring you aren’t touching your own face, keeping 1.5m away from everyone and getting in and out as quickly as possible. But with a massive disruption in food supply chains, not only from Australia but from overseas, has already altered what is available from
the supermarkets.

Now is a fantastic time to reduce the carbon footprint of your diet, get in touch with all your locally sourced food, not only will you cut down on CO2 produced from transporting goods, you are also supporting local jobs. The reality is with COVID-19 people are now very conscious of where their food has been. Make a big change in the way you shop, fresh local foods are still readily available and generally the businesses which you source them from are far less crowded than busy supermarkets. Usually it comes directly from the farm so transportation and handling of the produce is much less, and the farmers get more for all their hard work so it’s a win win situation. This also includes meat, there are some fantastic locally grown, locally owed butchers around. You don’t have to go vegan to make an impact, if every household made a conscious effort to eat one or two vegetarian meals a week, greenhouse gases caused by meat production would see a significant drop.
We can all make small positive changes within our households that will benefit not only our community, but our planet too.

“Many things have to change course, but it is we human beings above all who need to change” - Pope Francis, Laudato Si’