[Linda Rowley]
Welcome, everyone, to this breakout room. My name's Linda Rowley. I was one of the coaches allocated on this project, and I'm delighted to be introducing and facilitating the discussion today around the presentations from the Meli Women's and Children's Service, as well as their men's team, and also, Kids First. We are going to start with Steph Stokes, and also Mel Lamaro, who will be presenting from the Meli Women's and Children's Group. Mel and Steph, if you could unmute yourselves, that would be great.
[Steph Stokes]
Hello.
[Mel Lamaro]
Good morning. [inaudible]
[Linda Rowley]
Perfect. I wonder if you can just provide a little bit of context around your team to start off with, and then we'll launch into your presentation. Over to you, if you can provide just a little bit of background around the team.
[Steph Stokes]
Thanks, Linda. I'm Steph and this is Mel. Mel is our wonderful team leader on the women's team. We provide support to women and children who are experiencing family violence. It's a case management service. We have about 10 [inaudible].
[Mel Lamaro]
10 of us, give or take, and we do provide a direct service. We're not a preventative programme, we are a direct service programme. We work really closely together and yeah, we are quite close together. Our wellbeing and working as a team is really important. We come from-
[Steph Stokes]
Yes, sorry, we'd like to just acknowledge as well that we're presenting from Wathaurong country this morning, and pay our respects to Aboriginal people, and the traditional custodians of the land, so thank you. Other than that, I think we're pretty much ready to get into our presentation, Linda.
[Linda Rowley]
Perfect, thank you. I can see some beautiful images behind you, and I know that you are going to give us some context around those as well. Are you able to share your screen and go through your presentation?
[Mel Lamaro]
Yes.
[Steph Stokes]
Doing that right? Yeah.
[Mel Lamaro]
You may see some familiar faces, the men's team of [inaudible]. Can you see that now everyone?
[Linda Rowley]
We can. Thank you.
[Mel Lamaro]
Just moving you people around so we can see our team. Here we are. We created... we did a couple of things as a team, and back when this started, back when we first started doing the PERMAH project, we were quite a different team. We've had quite a few staff changes along the way, and we hope that these two tools that we developed will really move with us, and can provide some flexibility.
We created a series of photo language cards that we call our bounce cards. One of the things that we identified as being really important for us in terms of our wellbeing was building on our resilience. There's lots of wonderful things we can do for our wellbeing for each other, and for ourselves, and as a team, but we really wanted to focus on resilience, and how to help us bounce back.
[Steph Stokes]
That might provide a bit of context for our images behind us. These are some examples of our photo language cards that we've created, that you'll see we have creatively stuck up behind us. To get to this point of creating our language cards, we wanted to understand our values, as a team. We thought that was really important. We created this word cloud that you can see, where the words that are larger in the word cloud are the values that we chose to be most important to us, and surrounded them by other supporting values. We wanted to share our values through our tool that we created.
[Mel Lamaro]
We went through a process guided by Linda where we worked out basically what was important to us. We wanted this to be around acknowledging our struggles, as I said, and building our resilience, and normalising some of that struggle, but also around positive emotions, our strengths and our connectedness, not just to each other but to ourselves. What we did was we had a free licence to go out and take photos ourselves. That was part of what was important in this project, was us taking those photos in our own time, was very much an open book as to what you could take.
The idea was that we would develop a pack of 50 cards. I think we might've went a bit over, and we had to cull a few. We had an awful lot of pet photos, so we had to put some of those pet photos aside for another project. I think the idea is that moving forward, as new people join the team, that we can create... we can keep this as quite a flexible tool that we can add to, so that there's some ownership, and a sense of belonging to this tool.
[Linda Rowley]
Thanks, Steph.
[Steph Stokes]
As Mel said, the picture deck was designed to assist us to identify and also convey our feelings to each other, through things like reflective practise as a team, or group supervision, but also more casually throughout the day we might use the cards to, when we're feeling a particular way, to help us identify and share with each other how we're feeling.
As a second thing, we also thought that we would be able to use the deck with our service users. We run a support group for women who have experienced family violence, and we also thought that we would be able to use the cards in that way as well, because we thought that the images were quite universal, and similar emotions felt by everyone.
[Mel Lamaro]
Interestingly, different photos and pictures represent different things to different people. While one photo might mean something to the person that took the photo, to someone else it means something completely different. There's so many different ways that we can use these and interpret them.
Along the way was just a great fun exercise, looking at what everyone had brought together, and we discovered our wonderful perspective of our external world, which reflected our internal world. A little bit of a getting to know each other activity as well.
[Steph Stokes]
Yeah. There's just some more examples of some of our images. You've seen the dog one, we did have to [inaudible] quite a few dogs, otherwise we would've just had a deck full of dogs is, because I think one of our other values for the team is pets.
[Mel Lamaro]
More about artwork.
[Steph Stokes]
Yeah, and so that's our tool. We found that it supports positive emotions, relationships and meaning, and we look forward to using it in the future. We'd just like to thank the team for their contributions to the process, and also Linda for supporting us along the way to create our wellbeing tool, so thank you.
[Linda Rowley]
Thank you so much Mel and Steph, that is just amazing. It's wonderful to see all of those beautiful images and also to hear about how you are using those images, as well and in many different ways by the sounds of it. That's terrific. Again, if you would like to put some love for Mel, and Steph, and their tool in the chat, that would be great, and show their appreciation.
I will move on to our next presentation, just in the interest of time. Our next presentation, we have Taelah and Rachel, and they're from, again, Meli, from the men's team, the men's group this time around, doing their presentation on their resource, the appreciation wall. If you would like to take yourself off mute.
[Taelah]
Hello everyone.
[Linda Rowley]
Perfect. Would you like to provide a little bit of context, in relation to your team as well, just to set the scene for people?
[Taelah]
Yeah, for sure. We are the men's team, so the other half of mall and Steph, so we work with the men. We primarily run the men's behaviour change programme, so that's men that have used family violence. Our main role, to put it simply, because quite a complicated job is to support men to change their behaviours, keep the women and children in their life safe, but also be accountable for the choices that they've made to use violence. That's us. I didn't realise that a closeup of my face was the first presentation slide, Mel and Steph, so thank you for the heads-up on that. I also, I'm a bit bummed we're going second, because I'm not sure we can uphold such a high standard. That was really amazing actually. But either way, as Linda said, so we have created an appreciation wall, so I'll just quickly share my screen
[Linda Rowley]
I have seen your presentation and I have every confidence that you'll maintain the standard.
[Taelah]
Thank you, Linda. Can everyone see that all right?
[Linda Rowley]
Yeah. Yep. Perfect.
[Taelah]
Cool. Just really quickly before we get into why we created this particular tool, what we learned during this process was that actually... and it's been mentioned earlier, that we actually all need something very different in relation to our wellbeing. We have a really diverse team, and we started off trying to... I think we weren't trying to find a one size fits all, but we very quickly realised that there wasn't one, there wasn't a single activity or thing that we could create or do, that was going to be tailored to every single person, or was going to fit every single person. We realised that what we needed was buy-in from upper management to be able to do whatever we need to do, for managing our wellbeing. Whether that be really permission to take breaks, and to do whatever you need to do on those breaks, and managing workload, and caseloads, and capacity, and all of those things, which we do have already. That's really important.
But we picked this particular tool, because it was... for the showcase specifically, because it was the one that gave the most, I suppose, autonomy to people. Also, it had a real easy, opt-in function. That's something that we learnt doing this, is that all of our wellbeing tools, or anything that we did here had an opt-in, so nobody had to do it, and that it wasn't expected of anybody, and it was an opt-in rather than an opt-out. This one does that the most, the easiest. But some of the other stuff that we did do is we purchased some games. We are strongly encouraged to use those games on our break. We have board games, and card games, and a table tennis table, and totem tennis, and beanbag toss, and all of these things that sit in our storage room. We're encouraged to just take 10 minutes, go grab a colleague that also wants to take a 10-minute break, place some bean bag toss us down the hallway, just something like that that gets us away from our computers, gives us a break. That's some of the stuff that we also did in the background.
But however, the appreciation wall, so the way that it works is it's a wall, obviously, where we create profiles to put up on that wall. I'll show you an example in a sec, but the reason why it's an opt-in is because people can choose to put a profile on the wall, or not. Every couple of months we pick a new category, so that's randomly selected at a team meeting. We have a suggestion box that people put categories into. We randomly select one every three months at the team meeting.
The first one that we did, which I will show you just after this, is a pet wall. We all created... for anybody that wanted to, we all created a profile of our pets, fun facts about our pets, and then we put them up on the wall. The reason that we liked this was because again, if you don't want to put a profile up, you just don't. Nobody's chasing you, nobody's forcing you to do it. You can also... we have a blank template that we use so people can put their own creative flare on it. If they want to make it really plain and simple, they can. If they want to make it really cool, and funky, and they have a real creative ability, they can do whatever they want with it. It's a blank canvas. Then in their own time they can put that up on the wall. We have a designated area in which that we put them.
This is a bit of an example, this is my baby Willow that you're all about to meet. The first picture is our whole wall, so that's what it looks like. That's everybody who wanted to put one up there, that's their pet profile. Then this is an example of mine, so we just picked a couple of photos that we wanted, and Willow likes chasing butterflies, and digging holes, and her tyre toy, et cetera. A couple of things that she doesn't like and her favourite thing. Everybody's profile has the same questions for this particular one, and we just filled in the information that was relevant for our pets, and we put it up.
The why was... as I said, easy to opt-in, but also for us it was promoting connection and engagement. A few things like getting to know each other better. I mean, everybody knows that I have a baby called Willow, because I talk about her all the time. But we learned some things about some of our other colleagues who had pets that we didn't know about, and got to know their pets a little bit more. But mostly for us, the biggest thing was that it's a visual representation, in the space that we work, of the things that bring us joy, the things that we love, and reminds us of why we do the work in the midst of the challenges that we face, working with men using violence.
The who, is whoever wants to. Like we said, this is really just someone can put a profile up one category, and not the next. It's completely up to the individual. As I said earlier, so every three months a new category will be selected. The where is, it's on a wall, so you could see the wall in the other photo, but that is a pretty big traffic area. It's in our open plan office where we all sit, but it's also directly on a walkway to our printer, and our stationery cupboard, and stuff like that, so a lot of people walk past it. What we've noticed is that there's a lot of people, that are not even people that work in our building. They might just be visiting, or here for the day, or someone from a different office that will stop, and they'll spend five minutes reading the whole wall, and then they'll say something to someone like, "Oh, I didn't know you had a dog," or, "Oh, I have a golden retriever too." It's promoting that conversation.
These are some possible examples of also, again, about me. Everyone's getting to know me very well today. These aren't actually ones that we've created, but they were just example ones that I made, just to show you. Some of the three of the things that I love to do on the weekend, so walking Willow, and gardening, and yes, that is a real life photo of my first ever tomato that I grew. I have a bit of a soft spot for growing some veggies. Then again, just my three favourite meals, so Mexican, ragu, and schnitzels. Just... it's purely designed to just be really something fun, a bit lighthearted, and to get to know us better.
These just to end, were some of the PERMAH factors that we felt like this linked to, which is I think almost all of them in some way, shape or form, so obviously positive emotions. It was prioritising those moments of positivity so that... like I said before, they're the things that bring us joy, and that remind us why we do the work. Engagement, so discovering and developing our own individual strengths, things that we're good at, things that we enjoy doing, so just reminding us of that, and not in a work capacity. Because obviously it's easy to just get bogged down in when you're at work, everything being about work, but actually we have individual lives outside of that. Building connections with each other, getting to know each other better. Then the meaning, so supporting motivation for the work, and representing that the things that are meaningful to us, which is really important and sometimes gets forgotten. Then accomplishments, so celebrating our accomplishments at work, but at home as well.
As we said, because the template is blank, people can put whatever they want on it, and represent that however they want. If somebody is creative... I know there's a colleague here that we have in most of our offices, there's little paintings that she's done. If she wanted to, she could put a painting up on the wall. That's something that she's really proud of, and that she loves to do, and that she feels really accomplished in doing so, that could be her way of representing things that she loves doing, and what brings her joy on the wall.
Yeah, that's pretty much it. Just something that we can all be connected to, but that isn't requiring too much from anybody, and that nobody feels forced into participating in, because that was really important for us to make sure that nobody's doing something that is not what they want to do, or that's pushing them out of their comfort zone. Stop share. Cool.
[Rachel]
You're on mute, Linda.
[Linda Rowley]
Thank you so much, Taelah and Rachel, for your presentation. I can see already that people have started putting comments in the chat of appreciation, so I would encourage you to continue to do that. I really loved the opt-in element, and also just wanted to thank you, especially Taelah, for your vulnerability, and putting up your profiles for us as examples. That really made it real for everyone, so thank you so much again.
[Taelah]
No worries.
End of transcript.
Updated