Tell me your story: Mildura Living Histories.

“Tell me your story” is a community led project focusing on person-centred care across settings, but more than that, it fuels an intrinsic desire to recognise the value of people. It looks into older people’s influence on history through living it, and their recollection and preservation of history through sharing stories of it. Storytellers are residents of Princes Court Homes in Mildura. Each resident involved has responded to a call for interested parties to make themselves known to the community project team.
Residents meet with local writers to share their stories. The writers listen, write and return the stories to their owners enabling the preservation of a collection of personal historical anecdotes. One of the project’s outputs will be the publication of an anthology of these stories. Beyond this, we are interested to find out whether project outcomes could be applied, in any way to our medical students’ aged-care clinical experience.

The 2 year project contributes to developing a neglected field of creative work and research on print and public access e-platforms. The final outcome will be a formal evaluation of the project by Smith and Wright that may lead to similar projects in other regions.