When Mubarek’s dad got Covid his family was taken aback by how sick he became. Find out more and listen to his Covid story from our website here.

Or you can listen on the Apple podcast service here … or look us up on your favourite podcast service.

Hi it’s Leanne here.

It’s not everyday we have exciting new ideas 💡 (well maybe it is - we’re often planning new things) but it’s definitely not everyday that we also get the money to implement our exciting ideas!

However, we recently succeeded in getting a grant from the State Government for our new project - Covid Roulette - and we are now running at full steam to get it completed by mid May - when the funding needs to be expended.

Covid Roulette is a podcast series documenting the lived experience of Covid in our neighbourhood and more broadly across Darebin and Yarra.

As you have all probably experienced yourselves in the last few months, Covid is pretty much everywhere in our community and most of us now have our own Covid story in our family or friendship group.

What we are trying to do in our series is to capture an interesting mix of these stories, highlighting a range of social, emotional, economic and health impacts associated with catching Covid … for posterity, but also to enable us all to hear and understand the impacts for others, and hopefully encourage those who are still feeling vaccine hesitant to learn more about the disease through neighbourhood stories and understand better the gamut of risks that Covid poses.

We’re already well into recording and today we started publishing. You can find our first episode - Polly - on our website here … or on Spotify, Google, Apple and Amazon podcast/music services.

And … if you have a story you would like to share please let us know. You can email me here.

You might be a mum who has felt the burden of parenthood as the primary carer in these times, a person who couldn’t work while isolating and experienced economic impacts, someone who got quite sick, or had weird symptoms or someone who is experiencing long-covid etc. You might have a personal story and a professional perspective you could share.

From the dramatic to the mundane to the heartfelt … we’d really love to hear from you!

Are you interested in joining the 3078 History Group? They’ll be having their next meeting on Tuesday 9 November here at ACC from 7.30pm.

Come along and talk about the recent history walk publications, share your local knowledge, lend enthusiasm and/or help plan a new podcast series. It should be fun!

If you are interested in learning more about the history of our neighbourhood … and also like a stroll, perhaps you’d like to print out or collect our first History Walk.

This walk starts on the south side of Alphington Station and takes you on a tour of the Old Alphington Village. Thanks to Anne and the 3078 History Group for all the background work that has gone into this flyer, and thanks also to Lee for the graphic design and Kalimna for the photos.

We’re planning to record an accompanying podcast at some stage to sit along side this walk. We’ll let you know when this is active.

If you have a printer at home you can print a copy here. If you’d like to collect a printed copy you’ll find some out the front in the little brochure holder on the side of our seed library.

This week was Education Week and we were thrilled to get a grant from the Victorian Department of Education to run a couple of podcasting workshops here at ACC to help mark the occasion. Alphington Primary School embraced this opportunity, and on Wednesday sent 12 grade 6 students along to have a crack at using our new equipment under the guidance of local podcaster and author Tony Wilson.

It was a super fun day and the students walked away having made two podcasts each. We’re looking forward to the next group coming on Friday (fingers and toes crossed).