What are our Lifeline neighbours doing?

By Bryan Wilshire

Recently I was invited to be a guest speaker at Lifeline Australia’s annual conference. 250 Lifeline members from across Australia attended as did a number of international guests and representatives from other organizations within the Australian social services network.

What impressed me was the wide range of activities undertaken and the obvious passion and pride of each member. In addition to traditional telephone and face to face counselling service, Lifeline Australia offers a caring caller service, a prison befriending programme and support and suicide education for prison staff.

Lifeline Australia also offers a Community Recovery Trauma Response service. The service was heavily involved with both the floods in Queensland and the fires in Victoria.

The teams attend to:

Critical incidents Disasters

Domestic violence                           Flood
Suicide of loved one                        Bush fires
Rape                                             Cyclones
Workplace accident                        Train/Bus crash
Car Crash                                      Earthquake
House fire                                      Tsunami

Tragic Death/Grief                         Mass killing
                                                     Pandemic
                                                    Terrorist attack

They offer a range of therapy support including:

EFT    Emotional Focus Therapy
TFT    Thought Field therapy
CBT   Cognitive Behaviour Therapy
SFT    Solution Focused therapy
TNT    The Narrative Therapy
COT    Cup of tea

The teams have found that personal support, counselling and therapy works best as three overlapping treatments. They offer Psychological First Aid as a framework for providing helpful support following a traumatic event. Psychological First Aid aims to reduce the initial distress, foster short and long term adaptive functioning, and minimize the risk of further harm.

In addition, Lifeline Queensland provides a Psychological First Aid course for Lifeline members. The course is run on lines similar to our NZQA model of telephone counselling. Modules include:

1. Contact and Engagement
2. Safety and Comfort
3. Stabilization
4. Information Gathering
5. Practical Assistance
6. Connection with Social Supports
7. Information Giving
8. Linkage to Other Services
9. Follow-up

Fundraising – Lifeline Australia

Both Lifeline Queensland and Lifeline Australia operate a large number of good-will and pre-loved clothing and other specialty shops. This is a major fund generator (multi-million dollar) for Lifeline Australia. The specialty shops and clothing sales throughout the year include:

Export Clothing Sales
Annual Bookfests in Toowoomba and Warwick
Never Ending Stories and Duggan Street Bookshops
The 'Vintage Wardrobe'
The 'Collectables Shop - Once Was...'
Smart Tip ShopCountry Clothing Sales

Like ourselves, Lifeline in Australia is a charity and relies on the goodwill donations of the wider population to survive. Their stores have proven to be a very good source of funds, promotes conservation and recycling and are a way of increasing the number of people Lifeline comes into contact with thus improving understanding and awareness of what we do.