We Know Our Strengths

 

Introduction

The We Know Our Strengths project was a partnership between Waltja Tjutangku Palyapayi Aboriginal Corporation (Waltja) and MHACA’s (Mental Health Association of Central Australia) Life Promotion Program (LPP) and was funded for 2.5 years by the NSPS to work with 3 remote Aboriginal communities in Central Australia.  It was completed in May 2009 and was evaluated independently. 

The Project was funded to support activities which promoted resilience (strengths based activities), to share information about and awareness of suicide intervention and prevention and to develop local resources to support this work. 

The project was also funded to compile a Working Well Guide that could pass on tips and ideas about how to approach suicide prevention work for those unfamiliar with working with remote Aboriginal communities.  To download the Working Well Guide, click on the link.

The Project
We started by using a community development approach and drew upon Waltja’s existing organisational knowledge, policies and practices to guide community work.  After difficulties in recruiting and then retaining project staff, we employed a male Aboriginal worker with local knowledge but who had not worked in mental health before.  The Project worker was located with Waltja but spent time with Life Promotions also learning more about community education and suicide awareness training.  He also visited or contacted Life Promotions staff if there were matters more concerned with suicide than with his work with the communities per se.

We engaged with key community members and other service providers to create more opportunities for groups in communities to do the things they viewed as keeping them strong.  Because our key project worker was male most of the activities we provided were initially for the men but were usually linked with their broader family involvement, including as fathers, uncles and grandfathers.  Activities were diverse.  Examples included:

• visiting country around the communities for swimming in water holes, going hunting or just sitting relaxing with a cup of tea.  Several visits were overnight but most were day trips;  most included opportunities for older & younger men & boys to gather together.
• joining in with a horse breaking and cultural exchange project with BushMob, an Aboriginal service for young people ‘at risk’ of - or from other’s - substance misuse;
• men’s healthy cooking and nutrition session;
• cultural exchange between youth workers and young people from one community with another;
• supporting the revival of traditional men’s dancing from one community;
• personal support and referrals for individuals re: social & emotional wellbeing.

We rarely did a larger group based activity solely by ourselves and worked collaboratively with at least two other NGO projects – Central Australian Aboriginal Congress and BushMob - and with Government health promotion programs.  Strengths work was more like the mortar than the bricks in a building:  we listened, linked people and ideas together and gave practical support wherever it was needed and we could provide it within the overall scope of the project.

We started by encouraging strengths and strength based activities.  We didn’t start off by mentioning the word ‘suicide.’  We came at the topic sideways, mentioning it quietly, gauging responses, backing off if necessary and waiting for people to raise it again for themselves or for an appropriate time in which we could do so. 

Our project – sensitive within its own right – happened over the same time that the Little Children Are Sacred Report (on child abuse and neglect in remote NT communities) was released, the NT Emergency Response (the Federal Intervention into remote NT communities) was called and all the Community Councils that used to exist autonomously in each remote community were amalgamated into a broader, Local Government controlled Shire structure.  Each of the above had enormous impacts for community members, whether for better or for worse, and as one would expect these also flowed directly into what we could and could not do within the life of this project. 

Key community members were all too aware of suicide in their communities.  They live with attempts and threats on a day to day basis.  However, they either didn’t see the purpose of or weren’t ready to develop explicit “external resources” about suicide or suicide awareness at that particular point in time.  It was more the quiet, more informal conversations that Charlie, our main project worker, initiated with men in communities that helped spread useful information about suicide prevention as well as the strength based activities.  Rather than pushing people to develop resources like songs, paintings or flip charts we supported the people themselves, in all sorts of ways.  We listened, helped where we could and referred on where we couldn’t.  This often happened quietly or on an individual basis.  We also supported opportunities for community leaders within our project to participate in conferences or forums, to hear what others were saying and doing, and to build on their own confidence in speaking up in meetings.

As a way of contributing to a local/regional, customised suicide awareness, intervention and prevention resource, Waltja staff from the Strengths project contributed ideas and input into a training course that Life Promotions was working on as a separate but closely related project.  Mainstream programs usually rely too heavily on English literacy, are located outside the cultural values in our region and assume remote communities have immediate access to a broad range of health, educational and welfare services, including basic emergency services like police, ambulances and hospitals.  Therefore, Life Promotions was in the process of creating Suicide Story, a more appropriate, localised suicide awareness and prevention training course that could be delivered to a variety of audiences including indigenous and non-indigenous health, youth and related workers and community members themselves.  The Strengths project worker helped trial early drafts of the resource with a men’s program within the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress health service.

Towards the end of our project we also trialled some of Suicide Story at a workshop we held involving key project advisors and participants from two of the three communities.  People also discussed who should receive this sort of training and how it would be best delivered, we got input into strengths based work within communities and information to add to our Working Well Guide.  Participants included leaders we had supported through the project, Waltja committee members (all of whom are leaders in their own right in their communities), Waltja’s Community Youth Workers (all local anangu) and young adults these leaders and workers decided should come along to the workshop. 

The Working Well Guide was developed at the end of the project and is a document outlining processes and learnings we found useful for those unfamiliar with or not from remote Aboriginal communities in our region.  This paper includes information about providing community based education and development projects addressing suicide and self harm in remote Aboriginal communities in our region, working in the region and strategies for worker safety and self care.  It has broader applicability for non-Indigenous staff working in general in remote health or community services or, for that matter, with Indigenous communities and families. 

Key findings and feedback
Key outcomes or findings from the project included the need to approach the topic of suicide indirectly, at least in the initial stages, the value of embedding the project work itself within a strengths based practice paradigm, and the need for all strategies and programs designed to assist Aboriginal people to directly involve them at all stages of project design, implementation and evaluation and, above all, to operate within the parameters of local culture.  Community education or community development projects also need to be funded for considerable lengths of time – well beyond 3 year funding cycles – to optimise chances of success, especially if they are seeking to address complex issues such as suicide prevention. 

Evaluation of community development initiatives is difficult to implement and measure.  We found using organic internal evaluation processes such as participatory Action Research in combination with an independent evaluation process conducted by a consultant who was familiar with the local culture and context of our work enabled us to progressively reflect upon and ‘fine tune’ our own responses.  This helped to ensure project participants and their communities derived maximum benefit from the additional resources available through the project.

For more information

Waltja
Contact Liz Archer on 8953 4488 or email youth@waltja.org.au.  You can also ask to speak with any of the workers from our Reconnect (youth) team.

Life Promotions Program (auspiced by the Mental Health Association of Central Australia)
Contact Life Promotions on 8950 4608.  You can visit their website http://www.mhaca.org.au.  The home page has lots of links to resources related to mental health generally and to suicide and self harm.  To find out more about the Life Promotions Program go to http://www.mhaca.org.au/programsLPP.html

Project Evaluation
The project was independently evaluated by Julia Burke, Principal Consultant with "Go Burko!" She can be contacted at Julia.burke@bigpond.com.au

Concerned about someone ‘at risk’?
If you are concerned that someone in a remote community is at immediate risk of suicide, contact your nearest clinic or police station.  You can also call the Community Mental Health Team via the Alice Springs Hospital on 8951 7777.  Ask for the ‘On Call Mental Health Worker’.

The guide will be available for download from both Waltja and Life Promotions websites by June 30th 2009 and a limited number will be printed and available for project communities, other project stakeholders including DoHA and our Independent Evaluator, and other national suicide prevention projects currently working with remote communities.  Should there be sufficient demand we will consider subsequent print runs to be sold at cost price.