Well, another year has flown by! This one has been both challenging, and seen significant progress back towards what we used to think of as “normal”!
We have, of course, still been sorely missing our beloved Saani. It has been over a year since her untimely passing, but we still have community members looking out for the gentle wisdom of her responses to queries on Facebook, and we miss her dearly. We are in the process of planning our first annual memorial fun day, and we are also planning to rename the HEWA Scholarship Program in her honour when that is relaunched.
We are also still feeling the financial impacts of the COVID pandemic, and the disruption that caused to our regular activities, although we are gradually restarting most of those.
LEAP has been successfully reborn in a new incursion-day format, and has also begun to run excursions to a variety of inspiring activities. The latest LEAP initiative is a new playgroup for below-school-age children in our community, filling a long-felt need for connection opportunities among our smaller people and their parents.
The HEWA Teen Ball relaunched in 2022, as a sell-out event, which was hugely popular with our high-school-aged set. We also ran a Year 6 Graduation dinner disco, to celebrate the transition of our primary-aged young people to the high-school bracket – this was also a big success. We are also planning more regular disco events, to be run in different locations across Perth for yet more fun.
HEWA has also continued our periodic meetings with senior Department of Education personnel, to keep abreast of updates from them, and to communicate any issues shared by our membership.
We could not do what we do without our wonderful volunteers, and of course our members – membership subscriptions are by far the main source of funding for everything HEWA does. I would like to extend a huge thankyou to everyone who supports HEWA’s work for our community. If you’ve been meaning to get involved, or meaning to join, but haven’t got there yet (we *know* how busy we all get!), we encourage you to jump on board as you are able. Every membership strengthens our voice as we advocate for our community, as well as our financial viability, and every volunteer helps HEWA do everything we do!
Liz Read
Chairperson, Home Education WA
