Welcome Day 2

Geri Sumpter

Good afternoon everybody, I’m absolutely delighted to be here with you for Day 2 of our Be You Virtual Conference for 2023. My name is Geri Sumpter and I have the absolute privilege of leading the Be You initiative for Beyond Blue supported by an incredible team at Beyond Blue and our delivery partners Early Childhood Australia and headspace.

We do have the conference theme of ‘Building capacity to thrive’ which we’ll be taking you through more amazing sessions today and we’ve got some things within here which were really brought out yesterday through their connection to our overarching theme and those things are: educator wellbeing, resilience, and diversity and inclusion. Today’s session is a little bit different we are moving from sort of the theoretical approach that we talked through yesterday to a more tailored approach today through some concurrent sessions across early learning, schools, and for leaders.

The sessions today are led by a range of experts including our keynote speaker Dr Rebecca Ray and education consultant Pam Ryan. We also have the opportunity for you to meet a consultant, we’ll have our virtual booths open again today and they'll be open after the keynote speech and before the closing keynote. The booths are a new addition to our conference schedule and yesterday they were incredibly busy so I apologise if you didn't get a chance to go to a booth yesterday or pop in and see a Consultant but you will have that same opportunity today. If you do find the booths are very busy then please note that you can put your message or the specific question you’ve got for one of our consultants into the chat and we will get back to you personally and answer that question for you as well, and you'll see the link to where you can lodge that question going into the chat box now.

I also want to point out that our concurrent sessions today, you will find those in your timetable for the day they're the ones that you'll see in the white, um heading slides, if you want to pop into our booth that's where you click on the ‘join now’ from the yellow slide. So please take note of what you’re looking for, what you want to dive into and make sure you choosing that right banner when you're heading into those next sessions.

I’d like to Acknowledge that I am meeting on the lands of the Wurundjeri People of the Eastern Kulin Nation and I pay my respects to Elders past, present, and emerging. I’d also like to Acknowledge the Traditional Owners and Custodians of Country throughout Australia and their continuing connection to land, waterways, and community and we pay our respects to the peoples, cultures, and Elders past and present right across this Land. We do have people joining from all over the country and it would be wonderful if you could share your own Acknowledgements by putting the name of the Country that you're on into that chat - it's great to see where everybody is today.

I’d also like to recognise that yesterday we had an absolutely fantastic presentation from Reconciliation Australia, and I wanted to share here that we will have a new resource coming out soon - it is around how to think about the context of the Country that you're on and how to connect with that context in your own community. So, look forward to sort of sharing that, that resource through our marketing channels when it's ready for you but please keep your eye out for it. And if you didn't get to see the Reconciliation Australia presentation yesterday then please look out for that when it does get shared on our website in approximately 4 weeks’ time.

I want to recognise that talking about mental health can bring up experiences that are difficult for us and so this slide here really gives you an overarching view of some mental health service and supports that are available should you need them. I'll points out that you can contact one of those support services that are listed there on the slide and in the chat. But you may just need to take a break today so take a break, go and get a cuppa, go for a walk and come back to the session, or you might reach out to a trusted colleague or friend for a little debrief session on what's happening for you. But please know that this resource that is on the chat is available on our website and it is a really useful one to keep in the back of your mind for when you might need to reference these support services again in the future.

To give you a little context about the initiative that we’re talking to today, about Be You. Be You is the national mental health in education initiative and obviously is the organiser of this conference as well. We do work with our delivery partners headspace and Early Childhood Australia and the initiative is delivered on behalf of the Australian Government. We do live for Be You and our vision is that every learning community is positive, inclusive, and resilient - a place where every child, young person, educator, and family can achieve their best possible mental health. And we really look to provide that, that whole of setting approach to help educators support their own mental health and the mental health and well-being of children and young people. So, I look forward to you learning more about Be You today and some of the practical strategies that we can support with.

Everything about Be You is completely free, you’ll be very pleased to hear that. For educators we offer our online professional learning, we've got fact sheets, we've got sessions and events where you can meet our consultants and dive more into the detail of what we talk to, and we’ve got plenty of other resources on our websites.

We’ve got plenty of tools and processes to help you implement a whole learning community approach to mental health and wellbeing, and as I said we've got a diverse range of Consultants who have worked across everything from early learning through to school-aged care, through to all levels of schooling who can really help you to tailor Be You to suit your context. You can meet some of those Consultants today through the presentations that you might attend and they're also consultants that are present in our virtual booths -so if you want to pop into a booth and ask questions please feel free to do so.

We’ll also be responding to any other questions that you've got through our chat function and you’ll see through our chat function as well that we’ll be popping in references to resources that we have across the course of the presentations, so please look out for those as they'll be popped in as relevant topics come up.

The conference is all about building the capacity to thrive and we know that learning communities can grow and flourish when resilience is developed, educator well-being is prioritised, and diversity is celebrated. And as we mentioned yesterday, we gave you a bit of the theory around this and we talked a lot about resilience and I for one really enjoyed the resilience session and reflecting on the word that is and what it means to me and to others around. And resilience really is around the building that capacity towards and the recovery journey of those learning communities.

Educator wellbeing is around prioritising well-being to build capacity so educators can flourish and thrive. And diversity and inclusion is really building that capacity to connect, and create inclusive learning communities. And like I said from listening to the conversation yesterday we can really see that these three things that we've got here really support our main theme of building capacity to thrive and hope you're enjoying the way that these things are really interconnecting with each other.

Yesterday at the conference we discussed what thriving meant for each of us.  We also looked at how personal growth supports mental health and well-being and develops adaptability and a growth mindset, along with that ability to build connections across diverse communities. Today as I've said, we’re really looking at tools and resources and how we can put these theories into action. So, our session will adopt a much more interactive approach with the inclusion of master classes and exclusive sharing sessions from learning communities that have successfully implemented Be You into the way they do things.

We want you to have that opportunity to really share and learn from each other and so you'll see that we’ll have polls throughout the presentations today, there's also the chat function where you can share your reflections, your thoughts, your ideas and you can also put your questions in there as I've mentioned that we’ll try to answer as we go through or we’ll have some consolidated answers to later down the track for you. Please remember that when we are sharing things, we do need to consider confidentiality, a little bit of privacy and we need to maintain our self-care. And if you need some technical support and we did have a little technical hitch yesterday, that shows that you know we can be resilient and get through these things, but you'll find the IT support phone number on the bottom of the screen as and when you may need it.

Just a reminder that the conference is recorded, the benefit of this is that you can watch it again, you can share it with your colleagues, and you can reflect on what's been what's been said and heard throughout this conference. The recordings will be on the Be You website in about 4 weeks and we look forward to getting the interaction on those and seeing what you thought of the conference and of our presentations. You'll also be receiving a certificate of participation for joining us today, so we’ll look forward to sharing those with you once the conference is over.

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