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 our brief history and current plan.
Startup, Funding and Establishment (2022-2025)
Our organisation promotes the reduction the health effects of loneliness and social isolation through group programs of structured dance. From launch, we worked on advertising programs, fundraising, planning, website maintenance, people resources, administration and venue search towards our goal of participant sessions launch. We received a number of donations, for which we are grateful.
A major milestone was reached when the generosity of Inner West Council gave us a venue for use in 2024. We held dance sessions in Marrickville NSW for participants approximately twice a month from March to December. Also significant in 2024 was The Centre for Social Impact at @UNSW choosing Life Dance Community as a project for their class of approximately 300 Masters students. Their output will provide a deep resource for strategic and tactical marketing and fundraising for the next 2-3 years.
In 2025 health and volunteer facilitator availability issues prevented us from holding sessions for participants. However, a highlight was our acceptance into INCO Elevate Australia's pre-accelerator program for non-profits, which proved very valuable and again provided resources for development of our organisation. We continued to work towards our goal of relaunching participant sessions in 2026.
2026 onwards
We restart fortnightly sessions in February. Life Dance Community will be promoted in the our local council area and immediately adjacent areas. Our goal is to be self-funding by mid-year and have effective organisational processes in place. By the same time, in place will be a proven strategy for continuing promotion that grows participant numbers and increases awareness of our offering, especially among 'at-risk' segments of the community. Our intention is also to offer work experience placements to qualified graduates wishing to enhance their marketing and information technology skills.
By mid-year we intend to 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.
Key objectives for later 2026 and following years include:
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.