- REDWatch Roundtable on Human Services – Thursday 3rd May 6pm
at the Factory Community Centre – this is an opportunity for local residents to
raise their comments about what needs to change in the human
services system. A flyer to promote this event is attached. - SLHD’s Waterloo Health Forum 2.0 – Building a Healthy Resilient
Community 8.30am to 2.00pm Friday 4th May at NCIE. Everyone welcome please
RSVP to SLHD-Planning@health.nsw.gov.au
by 27th April, 2018 - FACS’s Waterloo Human Services Forum 3 for Government and
Non-Government Agencies (NGOs) Tuesday 8 May from 12.30am to 4.30pm queries
regarding this event to hsplanwaterloo@facs.nsw.gov.au
So what are human services?
Inner Sydney Voice in its latest magazine
describe them as:
Human Services are those which provide a service to
society, particularly in times of crisis. Human Services are designed to help
people navigate through crisis or chronic situations where the person feels
they need external help and guidance to move forward with their life and
rediscover their self-sufficiency. Sometimes the situation the person needs
help with is external, such as the loss of a job or income, the need for food
or housing or for help getting out of a dangerous situation, such as family violence.
For other people the difficulty is an internal challenge such as depression, a
physical ailment, disability, or other mental or physical health crisis.
[Adapted from humanserviceedu.org]
FACS
LAHC Waterloo Human Services Plan
REDWatch has been pushing for
improvements in human services since our beginnings in 2004. Our summary
of human service interventions shows that a lot of human service water has
flowed under the bridge since then. Changes to government allocations policies
for public housing in 2005 saw a significant concentration of people with high
and complex needs in public housing over the following years. These new allocations
were supposed to be accompanied by a Human Services Accord in which government
agencies would provide support for people in this “housing of last resort”.
That accord never eventuated, leaving people with high and complex needs in
public housing without the supports to help them address their issues and keep
the roof over their heads.
When the Government decided to
redevelop the consolidated Waterloo Public Housing estate, it became clear that
it wished
to increase the density by 3.5 times, while
keeping the number of social housing tenants the same. If the human services
system was not working before the redevelopment, what was going to be done to
make it work at much higher density? Redeveloping the buildings without
addressing the ‘people supports’ was doomed to failure, in REDWatch’s view.
Last year REDWatch made it clear
to FACS that it could not support any Master Plan for Waterloo unless it was
accompanied by a plan that addressed the existing human services issues facing
public housing tenants in Waterloo. REDWatch also made it plain that it needed
to see the systemic problems in the human services system, that were impacting
public tenants, addressed. It is encouraging that FACS Land and Housing
Corporation (LAHC) has agreed to prepare a human services plan for Waterloo.
Work on that framework is currently underway and it does aim to also deal with systemic issues.
To date government and NGOs have
met twice. The first meeting was primarily about the existing government human
services policy frameworks that a plan will need to fit within, including Future Directions and the NSW
Human Services Outcomes Framework. This workshop also dealt with issues
connected to the community facilities required in the Waterloo master plan –
here you can see some details from the presentations in FACS
Waterloo Human Services Planning #1 Workshop of 20 February 2018. The
second FACS workshop was aimed more at the issues that needed to be addressed
from those working at the grass roots – you can see an outline from that
meeting in FACS
Waterloo Human Services Planning #2 Workshop of 20 March 2018. The third
meeting on 8 May aims to try to bring the
Framework and Policy together with the issues so far identified from the
community. Agencies with an interest in Waterloo service improvement are
encouraged to attend.
The FACS LAHC meeting on 8 May,
will be a preliminary pulling together of the issues and the framework. Further
work will be undertaken by consultants and LAHC staff over the next few months, to produce a Framework and Phase 1
Implementation Plan by November 2018. FACS assure us there will be formal
opportunities for tenants to provide input into,
and comment on, the plan over the coming
months. REDWatch, Counterpoint Community Services and Inner Sydney Voice have
been inputting into the Plan discussions and trying to ensure that it addresses
the issues we are hearing from the communities.
You might recall, as an example, our call,
late last year, for case studies. The next REDWatch meeting is another attempt
to get stories and examples to feed into the discussions to make sure it
addresses the issues that matter for
tenants.
There are a few things REDWatch
needs to watch in this process. The systemic issues faced by tenants in
Waterloo are similar to those elsewhere in public housing and there will be a
temptation to try and exclude some of the systemic issues from the plan because
they are wider than Waterloo. Yet, if these systemic issues are not addressed,
then after a redevelopment, tenants will continue with their existing issues in addition to those that come from living with
their complex needs in a higher density neighbourhoods. In Waterloo, the systemic issues
need to be addressed if the redevelopment is to work – that is both the risk and the opportunity.
The second area to watch, is
that while the proposed human services plan is put together as part of the
redevelopment, 1 in 5 Waterloo public housing units fall outside the
redevelopment area. These people need the human service improvements now, not just those who will live in the
redevelopment. The redevelopment however is what is driving the human services
plan.
The third area is the evidence
base. Currently there is a tendency within
government that if you cannot count it, it does not exist. But as Ross
Gittins reminds us in Wednesday’s SMH “Not everything that can be counted
counts, and not everything that counts can be counted”. We do need an evidence
base, but it has to be recognised that the
experience of the service user’s count and not just the figures that are or are
not yet collected.
REDWatch
Roundtable on Human Services – Thursday 3rd May
REDWatch wants to hear from
service users, public tenants and residents about what they think needs
to be fixed in the human services system. This meeting REDWatch has invited
some service users to provide some brief inputs on their experience of the human
services system to set the scene. This will then be followed by a discussion
facilitated by Lyn Lormer from the Local
Community Services Association (LCSA). Lyn has been trained in the “Harwood
Collective Impact” process, which has been used in a number of communities and
she will use some of her skills to help us identify what needs to happen to
address human service issues in our area. Grant Lavender from The Factory will
be at the meeting to provide support to Counterpoint CS
service users participating.
I encourage you to come along,
bring your stories and ideas about what
could be changed to make the system better. The REDWatch meeting is at 6pm,
Thursday 3rd May 2018 at the Factory Community Centre, 67 Raglan
Street, Waterloo – this is an opportunity for local residents to raise
their comments about what needs to change in the human
services system. REDWatch will collate the
issues raised and feed them into the human service discussions.
Sydney
Local Health District (SLHD)
About a year ago REDWatch, Counterpoint
Community Services and Inner Sydney Voice met with the head of SLHD, Dr Teresa
Anderson. We asked that SLHD become more actively involved in addressing the
human services issues in Waterloo. We wanted Health to address how people
navigate the health system, how the health system interacts with other human
services, and how population level health issues could be best addressed as
part of the redevelopment.
One of the first outcomes of
that meeting was a Waterloo Health Forum in September 2017. You can see some of
the issues coming out of that forum in the Report
of the Building a Healthy and Resilient Waterloo Now and Into the Future 27th,
28th September 2017. These findings have fed into the planning around the
Waterloo human services plan that FACS is developing.
The SLHD forum on 4 May at
8.30am is the second Waterloo Health Forum focusing on Building a Healthy
Resilient Community. This forum is open to the local community, NGOs, health
workers and government people. It is an ideal opportunity to get an overview of
what is happening in the area and to talk about how Health can better respond
to local issues in Waterloo. If you would like to go please RSVP to SLHD-Planning@health.nsw.gov.au
by 27th April, 2018 (This Friday).
The second outcome from our
approach to SLHD was for SLHD to employ a Healthy Living Link Worker for
Waterloo. Those who attended the last REDWatch meeting heard Kristian Reyes
talk about his role – he will talk also at the 4thy May Waterloo Health Forum.
We asked for this role in response to long standing requests from Waterloo NAB
and others for a Health “go to person” who could help address the complex
health issues that people cannot seem to get addressed currently by the Health
system. Kristian has also been attending the FACS LAHC human services meetings.
He currently operates from The Factory on Wednesday (Thursday for this week after
ANZAC Day). You can contact Kristian by email at Kristian.Reyes@health.nsw.gov.au.
The third outcome we asked of
SLHD, was to bring a Health Impact Assessment (HIA) lens to the Waterloo
redevelopment. SLHD had been doing a HIA on Green Square. This study should be
released in the near future and it will be helpful in looking at a range of
health impacts associated with a high density inner city redevelopment. Many of
the issues raised will be relevant to Waterloo,
but what will be missing is the impact of redevelopment on a community with
high and complex needs. We hence asked SLHD to do a Health Impact Assessment
for Waterloo. Health were unable to get a HIA into the initial study
requirements for the Waterloo redevelopment,
but they did get an undertaking that the health elements of the other studies
would be pulled together so a gaps’ analysis
could be done. We wait to see if this materialises from the studies when the
summaries are released. SLHD however remains
committed to bringing an equity focused HIA lens to the Waterloo redevelopment
and we will find out more about this at the 4 May Health Forum. David Lilly,
who worked for LAHC during the Waterloo master planning in 2011, was recently
employed to work part time on Waterloo HIA issues for SLHD.
In
Conclusion
I have provided a brief context
for where the meetings mentioned at the beginning of this email fit in to what
REDWatch and others have worked on over the last couple of years.
When I am asked how we are going
on the human services changes, I usually reply “so far, so good”. We are all
acutely aware that the wheels could fall off some of it, at any time. After
all, there is a long list of human services interventions that have not delivered
the change necessary in Redfern and Waterloo. We need to understand why this
happened in the past and all try our best to make sure that this time we get
results that address the supports and issues that are desperately needed by
Waterloo public housing tenants. Hopefully this would result in the supports
tenants need to achieve a successful tenancy while allowing the quite enjoyment
of their homes for themselves and their neighbours.
When I was first learning about
community development, we used to talk about grabbing the near edge of a
problem and working on that near edge, as a way of tackling the bigger problem.
That approach is relevant for tackling this problem. The parts of the human
service problem you see as a service user, a neighbour, a friend, a local
service, a faith based community, a government worker, a councillor or an MP
will all be different, but they are all
parts of the human service system problems we are trying to fix. To help get
these problems fixed we need your perspectives and for you to speak up about
how you experience the problem and why it must be fixed. Together we can give
this a good shake and hopefully make a difference for people in the future who
need to access timely, joined-up supports.
Geoffrey Turnbull Co-Spokesperson REDWatch.