Blog #1

Hey everyone, I’m Aleksandra and this is my first blog entry. I was lucky enough to get one of the state government internship and am spending my internship at the Working with Children (WWC) screening unit, which is a unit within the Department for Child Protection (DCP). The WWC screening unit has many different areas (including legal, compliance, screening etc.) I’m in the Community Engagement and Policy area, which consists of 5 wonderful women.

I’ve had 7 days already and it’s been going by so quickly. So far it has been a really good experience but it’s a lot to get my head around. The legislation is relatively new (proclaimed 1^st January 2006) and there are still a lot of gaps, exemption and rules that make it somehow hard to understand. This obviously makes it harder to get the correct information out to the target audience as well.

Basically the WWC check is a check people in child-related work need to have, in order to work with children. If you have no previous (relevant) criminal history you get a WWC card. The card is valid for three years and the WWC screening unit will be notified if the person commit any crimes while having a WWC card.

Some of the responsibilities they wanted me to do when I came were to help plan a conference for 2012 and go through their existing marketing and PR and review it as well as give recommendations for how to improve their material.

We started planning the conference and went through a lot of meetings and brainstorming session to try and create a plan for the structure. We had to research potential guest speakers, venues, competition and so on. I quickly realised how much planning that goes in to planning a big event. Unfortunately they have had to postpone the conference because of the unit’s busy schedule, so I’m not longer working on this. I still got a feeling of how it would be to plan an event and how many thoughts and ideas that needs to come together in order to make it successful.

The last days I’ve been going through their material and trying to give them some feedback and recommendations to hand back to them in a report. I’ve just started on their material targeted to the indigenous people and find this especially hard considering I’m Norwegian and don’t have the best knowledge about this group. In the material handed out to them, they have changed the colours of their logo and branding to red and yellow (instead of green and purple), as these colours are significant for this target audience. Do you think they should be consistent with their colours and stick to the green and purple or keep using the red and yellow when targeting the indigenous?

Hope you all are enjoying your practical experience!

Aleksandra
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