Life Dance Community has a clear vision to promote the prevention and control of diseases associated with loneliness and social isolation through dance. This is the plan for our first two years.

Startup Funding and Establishment

Nov 23. We are planning on starting operations in Sydney's Inner West in Jan-Feb 24. An application for venue hire approval and grant has been lodged with Inner West Council. Two dance facilitators have agreed to work with us. We have started a crowdfunding campaign to raise $5,000 seed funding (please help! see our donation page).

First six months

Life Dance Community will be promoted in the local regional area. This phase should end with at least two sessions a week being held and one 'family day' per month. Our goal is to be self-funding by the end of this period and have effective organisational processes in place. We also want a proven strategy for continuing promotion that grows participant numbers and increases awareness of our offering, especially among 'at-risk' segments of the community.

Second six months

Having created a stable and secure organisation with a program which can be demonstrated, we will begin a process of reaching out to other community enterprises interested in issues around social isolation. These will include aged care, disability and mental health organisations and practitioners. We will be looking for ways to partner in developing new programs which can meet the needs of specific client groups.  If you are interested, there is more information here.

Second year

Key objectives for our second year will be to:

1. Establish at least one partnership with researchers who are interested in developing projects to study the effectiveness of our programs for addressing loneliness, social isolation and wellbeing. Ideally this work will eventually result in papers accepted for publication.

2. Starting dance sessions in at least two new locations, specifically targeting areas of social and economic disadvantage. We hope that we can involve local community leaders (for example, Aboriginal elders) in this.

Our intention is that Life Dance Community self-funds its programs. However we will be open to external funding for specific projects such as research or expansion to new locations as long as we can be confident in the longevity of such initiatives.