Beacon Strategy - Gambler's Help Sector

The Beacon Project in Gambler’s Help

In late 2009, The Office of Gaming and Racing in Victoria funded the expansion of The Beacon Project into the Gambler’s Help sector. The Beacon Project is a major workforce development strategy designed by The Bouverie Centre to support counsellors and services to embed family inclusive/sensitive practice into everyday service delivery.

The following Gambler’s Help services joined the project in 2010, registering as Beacon sites:

• Gambler’s Help City;

• the Gambler’s Help teams at St Luke’s Anglicare and Centacare Mildura;

• Gambler’s Help Western;

• Gambler’s Help workers from Latrobe Community Health Service; and

• the Hume Gambler’s Help Consortium.

This cohort completed training in the Single Session Family Work (SSFW) approach mid 2010, together workers from other service settings, including Alcohol and Other Drugs (AOD) workers. Representatives from the new Beacon sites in the Melbourne metropolitan region were welcomed into the existing AOD SSFW Cooperative Inquiry Group, and three new SSFW CIGs were established to support staff from different service settings, including Gambler’s Help, located in regional Victoria.

Cooperative Inquiry Group meetings provide an opportunity for representatives of participating Beacon sites to meet with one another and discuss the practice approach that their service is working to establish. Each meeting is facilitated by a Bouverie consultant and is a space for members to reflect on the application of family inclusive practice in their service, to share emerging clinical wisdom or practice dilemmas, as well to receive support in addressing constraints to implementation.  The information generated is, where possible, feedback across the various sites and between the different levels of staff – workers, managers and funders.

With commitment to The Beacon Project now spanning across the AOD, GH, and MH sectors, a valuable opportunity exists for workers from all three service sectors to get to know each other better, connecting around a meaningful and clinically useful activity – the implementation of family inclusive/sensitive practice.

For further information, please contact Michelle Wills, Project Coordinator, via phone at 03 9385 5100 or via e-mail: m.wills@latrobe.edu.au.

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