By Tyler Wright
Disaster recovery psychologist David Younger will be coming to Olinda Community House this Friday 17 June to share advice and explore strategies about how the community can best look out for neighbours, family and friends one year on from the June storm event.
The talk, which will be a part of the Hills Creative Alliance’s ‘Community Focus Fridays,’ is being held with support from Yarra Ranges Council and the Victorian State Government.
“When you hear people talking about lying in bed and hearing one tree after the next after the next falling, and not knowing which one’s going to come through your house, or lying in bed after one’s gone through your house, because you don’t know where else to go; there are traumas,” Hills Creative Alliance Secretary and Liz Millman said.
“This is why I want [David Younger] to come and see how can we bridge the gap between the highly expensive one-to-one psychological support that people can sometimes get access to and the community chat around a cup of tea – where’s the stepping stone in between?”
Having attended community storm recovery events throughout last week as part of the anniversary, Liz said discussions were missing the “elephant in the room”.
“I think we should set up a hills community support network with all the organizations together, have a talk together [about] what’s the best thing that we can do to help ourselves
Last week, with the weather so awful, you’re thinking ‘what if the weather changes today?’ What would we do? What have we learned?,”she said.
“I’ve got no idea what would happen if we were out of power for three weeks again.”
The weekly friday meetings hope to forge community driven storm recovery and resilience, and the session with David Younger will run from 10:30am to 12:00 on Friday.
For more information, contact Liz Millman at lizmillman@yahoo.co.uk.
