OAM honours adult

A LOCAL resident was honoured last week with a Medal of the Order of Australia for her service to the Ferntree Gully community.
Jan Corben of Knoxfield received the award for the provision of community-based adult education opportunities.
A former primary teacher, Ms Corben has lived in Knoxfield since 1968 and helped found the Mountain District Women’s Cooperative in Ferntree Gully in 1975.
The cooperative, which is based in and around the Ferntree Gully Uniting Church, began as a crafts group conceived as a response to the lack of opportunities in the suburbs in the early 1970s, especially for women with few or no qualifications.
As the women went through the necessary administrative steps to establish the cooperative and become a legal entity, it struck Ms Corben how few of the women had the necessary skills to help.
Though the cooperative continued to make and sell goods, the focus shifted its attention to addressing a fundamental lack of education and skills.
In the late 1970s Ms Corben had become the coordinator of an HSC program, but realised that some of her students were not able to work at year 12 level, and so she worked backwards into adult literacy. In its early days, the cooperative catered mostly to women who had initially been denied or discouraged from seeking education.
“Now it is focused on a second chance rather than not having a chance in the first place, “ Ms Corben said.
“In more recent years we’ve had a lot more younger women who had mucked about at school, dropped out, had kids young and then realised that life was not terribly easy if they didn’t complete their education,” she said.
Ms Corben said aside from the qualifications, adult education had helped build community and given a sense of empowerment and self-confidence.
“Increased life skills enable people to function better in the community.
“(People) can go onto committees and those sorts of things that with low education they just can’t do,” she said.
Ms Corben, who gave a sizeable proportion of her 30 years to the cooperative as a volunteer, retired at Easter 2005 and said she was amazed when she heard about the OAM.
“I was overwhelmed and felt very humble.
“People say nice things like ‘You deserve it’, but I just think most people do what I have done,” she said.