Melbourne Service Club (MSC) an initiative started by a group of immigrants organised its first ‘Seniors Lohri Lunch’ in January @ Tandoori Times Yarraville.

The event was attended by around 70 people along with prominent dignitaries; Gautam Gupta who is the Acting Mayor of Wyndham Council and Sarah Carter,

Councillor City of Maribyrnong. The activities at the event included a singing competition for Seniors, Bingo, Karaoke, dance and other fun filled entertaining tasks.

In addition to focusing on areas such as Breakfast club for school kids, assisting organizations trying to eradicate youth homelessness, MSC is also focusing on working closely with seniors in our society, especially the ones who have recently migrated and still finding their feet in the country.

The three areas of focus by MSC to help seniors include:

• Removing Isolation – Despite so many organisations in the community,  there’s still a large number of seniors who are still isolated either due to the lack of awareness about these organisations or due to transportation, so by organising events like this MSC wants to create a network between youth and seniors and create a common platform for everyone to work on collectively.

• Transportation – Everyone knows how hard it is to move around without a car and what they have found is that lot of youth are happy to assist and volunteer their personal time to move seniors around. MSC is working on creating a communication channel through technology (such as a ride share app) where volunteers can register and provide their availability and the seniors can use it.

• Improve Communication – “This was the first thing we thought about when we started the club to how to assist seniors in getting up to date with the technology, MSC is planning to run a series of workshops to train seniors on using basic technology such as Facebook, Whatsapp, Email, Google Search etc so that they can communicate with other seniors and stay updated on various activities happening in the local community”, Ripan Sethi, President of MSC said.

The event was fully funded by WizWealth Finance, Natural Stone Importers and Tandoori Times.

MSC is also planning a Vaisakhi event in partnership with the Council which is likely to be attended by over 300-400 people.

For updates you can visit: https://www.facebook.com/melbourneserviceclub