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This Girl Can – Women over 50 in the Macedon Ranges

This Girl Can – Women over 50 in the Macedon Ranges

Summary

This Girl Can is an initiative of VicHealth, based upon the successful campaign created by Sport England. The campaign exists to celebrate and support Victorian Women embracing physical activity in a way that suits them. In 2019 we were successful in getting a $10,000 grant to support this initiative in the Macedon Ranges to target women aged over 50.

This grant was used to host a number of free come-and-try physical activity sessions across our shire, and to promote the sessions and the campaign itself on social and traditional print media. A total of 9 sessions were held across April and May 2019, ranging from staying strong to an introduction to running, where a total of 36 women attended. Giveaways of gym memberships were held at each event, and a healthy morning or afternoon tea was also provided.

This campaign also gave us an opportunity to build our social media presence on our Macedon Ranges Over 55s Connect Facebook page, and we achieved a lot of engagement in this space. Attaching our activities to those of a a state-wide initiative gave us a boost in a way we could never achieve organically; the state campaign included promotion across all social media channels as well as television commercial.

Website: https://www.facebook.com/Over55sConnect/

Key facts

Main target group: Only older women

Sector(s): Health

Desired outcome for older people:
Be mobile

Other issues the Age-friendly practice aims to address:
  • Ageism
  • Healthy behaviours (e.g. physical activity)
  • Inclusion
  • Participation

Contact details

Name: Naomi Scrivener

Email address: nscrivener@mrsc.vic.gov.au

Age-friendly practice in detail (click to expand):

Engaging the wider community

Project lead: Local authorities

Others involved in the project:
  • Private sector

How collaboration worked: We partnered with our local sports and aquatic centres, as well as a local running group to hold these sessions. We were able to fund the centres to staff these sessions at our cost, and provide the morning and afternoon tea, as well. The running group is run by volunteers, outdoor, so we did not need to pay for room hire or staffing costs, only morning and afternoon tea.

Older people’s involvement: Older people were not directly involved

Details on older people’s involvement: We planned this sessions for older people; given the time frames involved around the funding and completion of project, it was not possible to consult with older people about the type, times or number of sessions held.

Moving forward

Has the impact of this age-friendly practice been analysed: Yes

Was the impact positive or negative:
Positive

Please share with us what you found in detail:
Attaching ourselves to a bigger, well-known brand assisted our campaign in a way that we could not achieve alone. We would in future endeavor to hold sessions outside business hours, to open them up to more people. Social media combined with print media was a great way of promoting this age-friendly practice.

Feedback:
Feedback for this practice was overwhelmingly positive; however, there were some challenges worth learning from. The first was the session times; eight of these sessions were held during business hours; our Facebook feedback indicated people would have been more willing to come to sessions held out-of-ours, as they were still working full time or had other commitments during the day. The one session held on a weekend was the best attended. The other feedback related to the type of activities offered; in particular, the introduction to running, eg that running was not ‘fun’, that at over 50 they were past running, or that they believed running was for people at an elite level of fitness and that it was therefore not inclusive (despite the sessions being a walk-to-run beginners style group).

Looking back

Challenges:
A continuing challenge is reaching the unreachable in the community. Essentially, if you aren’t on social media and either following our page, or being captured in the target advertisements, in conjunction with perhaps not walking ground your town and seeing the posters, or reading the newspaper, this is no way you will know what initiatives are happening. Further to this, this isolated people may be further isolated by lack of public transport, to which a solution is difficult. Other challenges were, as previously stated, negative feedback around the type of physical activity offered, and times they were offered.