Month: October 2019

Categories
Stories & Feature Articles

Looking for people with room in their hearts and their homes

UnitingCare West’s Futures Foster Care service is looking for people with empathy and compassion to provide a home to young people with high care needs who are no longer able to live with their families.

Futures provides long-term disability and therapeutic foster care options for children and young people who may have significant trauma and abuse histories, as well as developmental, physical and/or medical care needs.

Neil and Beth Reynolds fostered their first child around 18 years ago, after raising five children of their own. They now share their lives with five foster children, aged 29, 11, 10, seven and five.

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Categories
Social Impact

Review: Stories from the Inside

2019, a podcast from Social Reinvestment WA

Stories from the Inside is a podcast from Social Reinvestment WA, a coalition of WA organisations, including the Uniting Church WA, working to fix our broken justice system. Each episode features one person’s story from inside that system and how the people around them – their children, partners, parents and siblings – have been affected.

Storytellers are honest and open about their experiences, and not afraid to own up to their own behaviour. The real impact though, is the stories of how they ended up on the journey towards the justice system in the first place. Stories of trauma, violence and neglect.

There’s Tyronne, who grew up in foster homes and when reported sexual abuse was ignored, and was then punished by his abusers. Or Theresa, with almost her entire family spending time in prison. Or Jennifer, whose son was incarcerated for something as simple as unpaid fines.

Hearing Renna’s story in the first episode really made me think about just how terrifying her situation was. Renna was homeless and abusing alcohol. She needed assistance and support, but  instead was met with aggression – something she’d come to expect from authorities.

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Categories
Stories & Feature Articles

Celebrating history at Northcliffe

Northcliffe Uniting Church recently celebrated the 60th anniversary of their church building. On Sunday 22 September, guests attended a special worship and lunch to mark the occasion. Naomi Backhouse, member of Northcliffe Uniting Church, presented this history of the church, and shared it with Revive.

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Categories
Stories & Feature Articles

Review: Survivor Memorials: Remembering trauma and loss in contemporary Australia

by Dr Alison Atkinson-Phillips, 2019, University of WA Press

I was surprised by this book. I know Atkinson-Phillips’ work from previous associations, so it wasn’t the high quality readability that surprised me. It flows beautifully and carefully.

I also knew it would be compassionate. As she travels to survivor memorials around Australia, Alison records the persons involved with empathy and the aesthetics of each site with sympathy. I often found myself quite moved, not because of any journalistic milking of my sympathy, but in the competent record of the story.

Why was I surprised? I just didn’t think that I would like the book all that much. It is a survey of record and I thought it would be laborious in detail and philosophy. Yes, it records in detail who did what and why, as a good researcher should. Yet it is skilfully framed within a history of memorials.

I half expected that the subject of memorials might be irrelevant to where I am at. However, as the story was placed out and the distinction between memorial and monument emerged more clearly, I found parts of myself.

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Categories
Stories & Feature Articles

Sustained by faith, hope and love

Rev Nalin Perera, Chaplain at Wesley College shares his reflections on faith, hope and love through the journey of life.

Throughout my adult life journey I have discovered with each passing year that life, first and foremost, is a journey of hope, with its twin companion, faith. Ultimately, by necessity, life has to also be a journey of love, otherwise it will lack depth and any real sense of purpose.

In the early weeks of January, I was struck down by a mystery illness, so serious that I was rushed to hospital and admitted to intensive care.

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