0:00 Linda: 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 the 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.
0:52 Steph: Hello.
0:53 Mel: Good morning.
0:55 Linda: 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.
1:14 Steph: I'm Steph. This is Mel. Mel is our wonderful team leader in the women's team. We provide support to women and children who are experiencing family violence. It's a case management service.
1:29 Mel: There's about 10 of us, give or take. And we do provide direct service, so we're not a preventative program. We are a direct service program. We work really closely together. And yeah, we are quite close together. Our wellbeing and working as a team is really important. And we come from...
1:58 Steph: Yes, sorry. We'd like to just acknowledge as well that we're presenting from country this morning and pay our respects to Aboriginal people and the traditional custodians of the land. Thank you. And other than that, I think we're pretty much ready to get into our presentation, Linda.
2:17 Linda: 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?
2:31 Steph: Yes.
2:34 Mel: You may see some familiar faces, the men's team are watching. Can you see that now everyone?
[On-screen text: Meli
PERMAH Wellbeing tool | Family Violence Specialist Women’s & Children]
2:50 Linda: We can. Thank you.
2:53 Mel: Thank you. There we go. Just moving you people around so we can see us. Here we are. We did a couple of things as a team and back when this started, back when we first started doing the PERMA 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 develop 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.
3:50 Steph: 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,
[On-screen text: The Specialist Women’s & Childrens team have created a tool called BOUNCE. The reasoning for the name of the tool, came about when going through the process of discovering what our team required to perform well in our jobs, enjoy what we do but also be resilient. To be able to BOUNCE back.]
3:59 Steph: that you'll see we have creatively stuck up behind us. And so, 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. And so, 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. And we wanted to share our values through our tool that we created.
[On-screen text: Playfulness, Shared Purpose, Change, Balance, Growth, Compassion, Resilience, Acceptance, Acknowledgement, Accountability
Understanding our values which guide us as a team is important. Our tool had to reflect our shared vision of who we are.]
4:37 Mel: 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. And 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 and the idea was that we would develop a pack of 50 cards, and 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. And I think the idea is that moving forward, as new people join the team, that 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. Thanks, Steph.
[On-screen text: The process of creating this tool was about understanding & acknowledging our struggles but also our positive emotions, strengths and connectedness to ourselves and each other. We reflected on how we were feeling by using imagery that meant something to us. We each decided upon 5 emotions that we wanted to convey to add to the 50 images of the photo language card deck.]
5:51 Steph: 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. And 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.
6:38 Mel: 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 that means something completely different. There's so many different ways that we can use these and interpret them.
[On-screen text: This picture deck was designed to assist our practitioners to identify and convey their feelings, through reflective practices such as group supervision. However, the deck can also be used by practitioners when holding groups for service users. The images are universal, just like emotions…]
6:55 Steph: Yeah.
6:57 Mel: 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.
[On-screen text: We discovered along the way a unique and wonderful perspective of our external world which reflected our internal world, of who we are and how we feel.]
7:15 Steph: There's just some more examples of some of our images. You'll see the dog one, we did have to, like Mel said, cull quite a few dogs, otherwise we would've just had a full of dogs. I think one of our other values of the team is pets.
[On-screen text: PERMAH TOOL | Contributions]
7:33 Mel: More about artwork.
7:35 Steph: 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. And 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. Thank you.
[On-screen text: Our PERMAH tool supports Positive emotions, Relationships & Meaning. We would like to thank our wonderful team for their contributions and being part of the process. We would also like to thank Linda for supporting us to find our way towards wellbeing.]
7:59 Linda: 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.
[End of transcript]
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