Those who have children will either have just finished school holidays or are in the middle of them. I am sure we can all remember the excitement with which, when we were children, we looked forward to these breaks from formal learning in a classroom, and the homework and assessments that accompanied it.
School holidays were great; getting out into the community and spending time with friends, maybe going to the cinema (yes, I am that old), and if you were lucky maybe going away on holidays. I clearly remember heading to Hervey Bay in Queensland, when it was a small fishing village, getting up early to fish, going to Fraser Island. We bought paper bags of lollies at the corner store, ate mulberry’s from the tree in the backyard, and spent time with my immediate family, and Nana, who always came with us.
How amazing that so many years later I got to establish our peer worker staffed and operated service in Hervey Bay.
It was a relaxing time. An opportunity to relax, as well as to develop different perspectives and skills. In hindsight, it provided opportunity to see how people from a different place lived, and what community resources were available there.
Over the last couple of years we have been co-developing our Social Citizenship Framework. The Framework builds on the concept of mental health recovery, a personal journey, to see recovery in the context of community. It looks to expanding the community resources people can use to pursue their personal recovery as a true part of their local community, and how we can support them to do so.
Supporting people to access community resources is not new. Community groups and social inclusion have been a feature of Flourish Australia’s work for decades, even well before the concept of mental health recovery was coined. This requires us to support people to build skills and confidence, and often also to support community organisations and other places to be welcoming, sometimes addressing myths and stigma associated with mental health issues.
On that subject, I was delighted that the Flourish Australia Community Advisory Council welcomed the opportunity to make comment on the draft National Stigma and Discrimination Reduction Strategy recently. The Council, consisting of people with lived experience from across Flourish Australia, reviewed the strategy and made a submission to the National Mental Health Commission. They made many specific comments on how the draft strategy might be improved, drawing on lived experience. What an amazing contribution they have made.
Mark
