CAQA Foundations Community Hub
Foundations Community Hub is a neighbourhood house on the Mornington Peninsula that helps local people build the reading, writing, numbers, speaking and digital skills they need for work and daily life. The hub runs an adult learning centre with pre-accredited and accredited foundation skills courses, a social enterprise cafe called Sprout where learners train in real shifts, a community op shop, a community garden and a busy front desk that answers questions about everything from bus timetables to Centrelink forms. Around 900 people walk through the doors each week, and many of them come to learn, volunteer and work in the same building.
The hub is open Monday to Saturday. The main site in Frankston North holds the cafe, three learning rooms, a computer room, the front desk, a hall for community groups and the garden. The Carrum Downs site has a learning room and the op shop with its sorting warehouse. Sprout Cafe runs a morning shift from 7:00 am and an afternoon shift to 3:00 pm, with a supervisor, a trainer and up to four learners on each shift. Learning centre classes run mornings, afternoons and two evenings a week. Volunteers staff the op shop, the garden and the community meals program under paid coordinators.
Foundations is an incorporated association governed by a volunteer committee and funded by the Adult, Community and Further Education Board, local government and its own trading income. The cafe holds a food premises registration with the local council and follows a written food safety program with daily temperature and cleaning logs. Every worker, learner and volunteer completes a safety induction, and hazards and incidents are recorded the same day in the incident register. The hub is a child safe organisation, keeps personal information under the Privacy Act, and reviews its policies each year with the committee and the people who use its services.