I am off to Broken Hill, which is great because I love the place, my team are doing a great job in the town and our QA audit gives us a chance to confirm that local job seekers are receiving great service.
It’s also a shame because it delays my opportunity to catch up with Stephen Pocklington, Director and lead facilitator at "Well, Beyond Recovery" and Frank Bristol (Balance NZ) who are in Sydney to lead a 5 day WRAP facilitators training program at our St Mary’s outlet
What’s WRAP?
Wellness Recovery Action Planning (google it) a program that dovetails nicely with the work that NOVA does and is proving to be a first class support for our job seekers that have experienced mental illness.
WRAP has 5 core concepts and these are:
Hope
Personal responsibility
Education
Self-advocacy &
Support
NOVA has been interested in developing our capacity to assist those job seekers that have mental health problems for some considerable time and WRAP training (we will have 30+ trained facilitators by the end of this week) is seen as an important adjunct to our development of this service.
Approximately 400 job seekers are presently registered with us that identify in this category and, while that’s a small number, we feel this is an area that our staff require better tools and training and our job seekers could use additional options.
On the subject of Psychiatric Disability and Supported Employment I can’t help but think back to 1993/4(?) when NOVA staff members Racheal Neal and Julie Mayor team in eth development of an innovative and highly successful program that found work for 15 people (all of whom had a diagnosis of Schizophrenia or Bi-Polar disorder). At the end of 12 months not 1 person had lost their employment and all reported significant improvement in their symptoms and self-esteem.
A brilliant program?
Absolutely, and that why the morons that fund these things decided to can our attempt and insisted we refer the then job seekers to a work crew that was being set up locally as these staff, ‘had more experience’ !
Well, that’s in the past. Today is Independence Day and now we have a large self-funding program that can experiment, develop and grow based on our own experience and best practice taken from around the globe.
That’s why we have WRAP and that’s why we are sending staff overseas and inviting international and local experts in the field to join us in Sydney. We want to develop the teams capacity to provide effective help and we want to go beeyond that to create an industry leading example of best practice that we can then share in the same fashion we always have.
July 2010 is probably the most exciting and busy month in the organizations history and, to support these developments the whole team is also attempting to make July the month for our best placements ever.
I am really looking forward to sharing the events we have planned with you and very excited about our growth and skills development projects.
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