At the Coalface
At the Coalface
Susie O’Brien has been with Mary and Martha’s Refuge for more than 18 months. Prior to this she had a diverse work history in Victoria, including a career as a police officer, and working in Integrated Family Services, group work, and community development. Before coming to Queensland Susie managed a large domestic and family violence (DFV) service with multiple program areas. These included intake, assessment, and response to domestic and family violence police incident reports; children’s counselling; outreach case management; case management of refuge and transition housing; the personal safety initiative; community development roles in the mental health and alcohol/ other drug areas to enhance service responses through improved referral pathways across the three sectors. Susie led the organisation through Victoria Royal Commission into Family Violence reforms including the enhanced responses to women and children in motels and collaborating in the operationalising of Victoria first Support and Safety Hub (the Orange Door). Thank you to Susie O’Brien, Community Services Manager Domestic and Family Violence, Lutheran Services for talking with us about Mary and Martha’s Refuge. Mary and Martha’s Refuge operates during business hours, Monday to Friday, with an on-call service available during nonbusiness hours.
19 . QCDFVRe@der, March 2021
What are the origins of the Refuge? Mary and Martha’s Refuge is the only Lutheran Services’ domestic and family program and we’re quite a small team. The origins of our Refuge go back to 1980, thanks to a group of women from the congregation at the Lutheran Nazareth Church at Woolloongabba. They accessed a small amount of government funding to support establishing the Refuge. Later the service moved to Bulimba where it was until 2012. Back then it was more like a shared house environment, with one communal living area, and one communal kitchen. We’ve been in these premises, that is a core-and-cluster designed model, for eight years. What is the size of your Refuge service? We have five accommodation units here, and three Department of Housing properties in the community as well as two cap head lease properties that we rent privately, and then rent out to women at a reduced rent. Since we have 10 properties, we can accept 10 families. Over the last 12 months, we’ve supported something like 120 women and children. At the moment we have 11 women and 24 children receiving a service. Obviously, this is more than 10 because sometimes women return to our service since things don’t always go ‘smooth sailing’ after they leave us. We let the clients know that they can return anytime for another episode of service, they just need to contact us.
