Ep 17 | Corina McCarthy: Building Community Through the Get Active Program

So for those who know nothing about the GAP program, can you give us a bit of an overview of what it is?

Okay, so the GetAptic program, I tend to run mine for about eight to nine weeks, but I can be up to around 10.

You can make them longer if you want to.

And so how I explain it to someone that asks me is that the first hour we cover up on a topic of information and there are some ones in the manual that you can do.

And we always cover nutrition.

That's one of the requirements.

But over the years, I've adapted.

the topics that I do a bit and I ask the group on that first session, what would you like to know about? What are your burning desires and your questions within reason that you'd like to know? So they put some topics up on the board and then my idea is to get out there and to find the information or perhaps find a guest speaker that might be able to come and talk about those topics.

And then the second part of our session is some form of physical activity.

And I like to try and showcase activities that people can get involved in once they get active programs finished because I think that's really important to create that sustainability.

So I have instructors that are running programs in the neighbourhood houses.

I try and get those to come or within our local community so that, number one, it introduces people to that instructor or two, into that program so they've got an idea.

Like we've recently at Sorrel had Fitness in the Park And there were a lot of people that went, oh, no, I'm not doing fitness in the park because it's just going to be too strenuous and it's going to be a bit crazy.

Whereas Ollie was fantastic and he was really engaging.

It didn't matter what level of fitness you were in because I actually went along and participated a couple of times because I thought it's really important when I was saying to people, you should go and join this program that I'd actually have a bit of an idea of what they were getting into.

So Ollie's going to come and do one of my sessions when I start my program in Sorrel next week.

He'll be one of our instructors.

because council look like they'll be able to run that again when my program finishes council will then be looking at running fitness in the park at the same time my program was running which I'm doing because fitness in the park was running in on a Monday and so my get active program will run on a Monday so it'll be that continuation so

Nice.

And so it's a bit of a combination.

You've obviously got your CERT4 so you can teach some of the classes, but you really connect with local providers that are already there.

What sort of other groups do you often work with?

Our neighborhood houses are the big one.

So in one of my Glenorchy gaps, we went out to the Goodwood neighborhood house and we went and did a site visit to the house, but we also then participated in their chair-based exercise class.

And we also went to Buchan house to their community garden and walked around the garden and got involved in our bit of an activity was in the garden and then back to the house to do a showcase of the house and they put on a lovely lunch for us.