The work we do at Our Place is carried out by a compassionate and hard-working team of volunteers. They cook, they clean, they listen, they play games, they read, they teach, they counsel and they care about all of the community members who come to Our Place. Every visitor to Our Place is known by name. We introduce ourselves, we shake hands, we record names and we make it a priority to remember who is who. Our visitors say Our Place is ‘different’ because they are always treated with respect and recognition.
"It’s not like a handout when everyone knows your name. It’s so nice that you guys always tell me you miss me when I haven’t been in for a while". (Lorelei)
This recognition and acceptance is the foundation for building relationships of trust, which develop, often over quite some time, to a point where the visitor feels like a community member (when the “Our” in Our Place becoming meaningful to them) and they feel they can ask for assistance with sometimes deeply personal and difficult issues that can be resolved, or at least mitigated, when they are shared.
We do the “simple” stuff:
We make phone calls for visitors, sort through paperwork, fill in forms, make appointments, provide small amounts of cash for public transport, write references, send faxes and mail letters or simply provide the Our Place mailing address or contact number when clients have no fixed address.
And we do the “hard” stuff:
Many of our community members have legal problems and pending court appearances, largely arising from their other problems (such as mental illness, intellectual disability, financial disadvantage and homelessness). Legal aid facilities are overbooked, overworked and often difficult to access for our visitors, who have problems managing appointments and dealing with long waiting periods. One of our most important services is our free legal clinic, which operates at Our Place every Monday, run by our wonderful friends from the Clayton Utz pro bono team. The legal team offers professional and patient service to all Our Place community members, providing solutions to both simple and complex legal problems and thus helping us to significantly improve outcomes for our “clients”, in many cases, helping them to avoid the “merry go round” of repeat incarceration.
There are many other serious issues we can address: We provide referrals to detoxification, addiction, anger management or abuse and trauma counselling programmes; we offer professional counselling on site; we have relationships with (reputable) local boarding house proprietors and assist with accommodation; we work with local mental health care workers on behalf of some of our visitors; we are able to refer to medical or psychiatric professionals if and when that is the most appropriate solution; we liaise with the Department of Housing on behalf of our clients; we promote our services through many local welfare organisations and enjoy reciprocal relationships with them. In summary, if we can’t solve the problem, we’ll find someone who can.