Feb 15, 2022
Lives Lived Well’s residential withdrawal and rehabilitation service, Wyla has joined the Cancer Council’s Tackling Tobacco program, enabling us to boost the supports we can offer our clients to quit smoking, in turn helping them to make lasting changes to their alcohol and other drug use.
The Tackling Tobacco program provides organisations with grants to build resources and staff capacity around quitting smoking. It also gives clients access to ongoing support beyond their AOD treatment program.
Around 80% of Wyla’s clients are smokers when they enter treatment. Currently Lives Lived Well pays for clients in the withdrawal unit to use NRT patches. By joining the Tackling Tobacco program, Wyla’s rehabilitation clients will be able to access subsidised NRT. Clients will have the choice of a nicotine inhaler or gum at greatly reduced prices.
The Tackling Tobacco program also gives Lives Lived Well’s Wyla staff access to four modules of online or face-to-face training covering topics such as understanding tobacco dependency, brief interventions and treatments. All Wyla staff will complete the training in the new year.
Post treatment, our clients will have access to the Cancer Council’s I Can Quit support line as well as the resources available through this service.
Our team is excited to do this training in 2022 and looks forward to offering subsidised NRT in support of our clients. The research tells us clients who can stop smoking are also likely to be more successful in reducing or ending their use of alcohol and other drugs.
Lives Lived Well is one of seven organisations in NSW to join the program in 2022.
Feb 15, 2022
Knowing your family story and having cultural knowledge are important parts of the recovery journey for our clients. Lives Lived Well’s Shanty Creek clients are fortunate to have Uncle Willie Clark close at hand to inspire them to build their cultural knowledge.
Uncle Willie Clark joined Shanty Creek residential service four years ago as a Support Worker, bringing with him a lifetime of skills and a deep understanding of his mob’s ways.
Willie is a proud Gunggandji man who grew up in Yarrabah, east of Cairns. His great great grandfather was a Scotsman, in charge of a pearling lugger in the Torres Strait, while his great great grandmother’s mob comes from Lockhart River on Cape York.
Willie describes himself as a ‘jack of all trades’. Some of the jobs he has held include as a Justice Coordinator at Lockhart River, an Operational Officer for QLD Health, a Community Police Officer at Yarrabah, an interpreter for the Magistrates Court, plumbing, working in road and bridge gangs, and hauling sugar cane carts.
These days, Willie’s role as a Support Worker sees him welcoming new clients to Shanty Creek, helping them to settle in, catching up with them to see how their treatment is going, and talking about traditional ways.
“I like taking our residents on cultural trips, whether it’s down to the beach or to the rainforest,” Uncle Willie said. “I talk to clients about the different trees and how they provide medicine or materials for tools such as spears, boomerangs, nulla-nulla and shields.
“If we are down on the beach or at a saltwater creek there are lots of trees and bush food we can use or eat.
“Sometimes I will have an activity about who you are, not by name but who you really are – like your totem name if you have one and what meaning it stands for, your clan group, your cultural respect and lore, healing water, women’s places and bora grounds.
“If a client doesn’t know much about their mob, I will tell them to go and Google it up. Then they start discovering all sorts of things about their family and their clan and I see the joy it brings them. It’s a wonderful thing.”
In his spare time, Uncle Willie enjoys teaching his great grandchildren how to catch prawns and crabs using traditional hunting methods. With five children, 18 grandchildren and 19 great grandchildren, Uncle Willie is kept very busy passing on his traditional knowledge to his own family. We are lucky to have him do this for our Shanty Creek clients as well!
Oct 1, 2020
Watershed and Lives Lived Well today, Thursday 1 October 2020, celebrate an amicable union by way of a merger between the two not-for-profit organisations.
The joining together of two long-standing service providers is aimed at strengthening services and continuing quality support to people and families impacted by alcohol or drugs.
One of the first initiatives they will undertake together will be to establish and deliver a new service in Nowra. Funded by the South Eastern NSW PHN, the alcohol and drug treatment service, called Nana Muru (better road), opens later this month.
Watershed’s CEO Will Temple will assist his organisation through the transition to become a part of Lives Lived Well.
Lives Lived Well’s CEO Mitchell Giles said he was looking forward to building on Watershed’s long-standing record of excellence in the region.
“We hold in high regard the support that Watershed provides. We are pleased to be in partnership with them, working with them to continue to provide a professional and helpful drug and alcohol support service,” he said.
Watershed services will continue to be delivered under the Watershed name, and clients will continue to see the same faces.
Mr Temple affirms that the merger will allow Watershed clients, staff and local community to benefit from the shared knowledge and resources of six other residential services across the Lives Lived Well organisation. It will also provide Watershed services with access to research and technology that is unique to Lives Lived Well.
Lives Lived Well provides drug and alcohol and mental health support in Queensland and regional NSW. Their teams deliver a range of free community services across multiple locations, including face-to-face and phone counselling, two headspace centres, outreach and group programs, detox and support services for families.
For more information about Lives Lived Well visit their website www.liveslivedwell.org.au
For media inquiries, email: [email protected]
1300 727 957
