YMCA SA cleans up awards during National Safe Work Month

YMCA South Australia recently took out gold in SafeWork SA’s annual Organise Your Own Workplace Activity competition for Safe Work Month. The competition encourages businesses to find creative and practical ways to improve workplace safety.

A focus on safety is critical to any quickly growing organisation, especially for the Y who have over 60% of staff under the age of 30. As such, our safety month activity had a special focus on young people. The ‘Youth Spruce Your Storeroom Challenge’ ran over a week and provided an opportunity to develop young people’s skills by putting themselves in a manager’s role with the responsibility of overhauling their storeroom with safety in mind. To participate, site staff had to be under 25 years old, with a site leader to help support the team. Teams then discussed a checklist of safety requirement requirements, send in the before and after photo and ensuring the results suited the site’s needs.

All participants did a great job, with many overhauled storerooms around the state. Some sites went even further and provided their locations extra signage and instructions on correct usage on equipment such as ladders.

Congratulations to Whyalla Recreation Centre for taking out the recreation challenge, and to Reynella OSHC for taking out the children’s services challenge.