The centre has opened a second site, but funding will be needed to ensure it is adequately staffed into the future. Photo: Ali Anderson.
The Illawarra Women’s Health Centre is making it more accessible for people throughout the Illawarra to access vital services by opening a second site at the University of Wollongong’s Innovation Campus.
The new northern location will support and replicate services already offered at the main site in Warilla and the centre’s general manager Ali Anderson hoped it would open the door for new demographics to have access.
“It’s actually been on our radar for a while and it’s in our strategic plan to open up a northern site because we identified that at Warilla we were mainly servicing people within a 25-km radius, predominantly white women, and we cover all the way from Gerringong up to Helensburgh so there was a huge proportion of the Illawarra that we weren’t servicing,” Ali said.
“Up here our focus is to capture a lot more of the culturally and linguistically diverse, First Nations women, women with a disability and young women because of course we are located on the university’s Innovation Campus.”
The prime location is not only a shorter commute for those coming from more northern suburbs of the Illawarra, but is also easily and affordably accessible for those coming by private or public transportation.
“Where we are now there’s lots of parking, public transport; we pay for parking for our clients, there’s a free bus that comes here, we’re near the train line, so it’s a whole lot more accessible and we are finding that we are capturing the demographic that we weren’t getting as much of down at the southern site,” Ali said.
The centre submitted a pre-budget funding submission to the NSW Government but was unsuccessful in receiving the money to push ahead.
But because of the need, the organisation dipped into its own pockets to get the ball rolling in whatever capacity they could.
“What we’re doing by taking on this site is actually investing our surplus funds over the past few years into opening and running the site; what we don’t have is the funding to staff it.
“All of our staff are working across both sites so what it means is we’re not actually picking up additional people or additional clients, we’re just able to expand the geographical reach of the services we do have.”
Most services, including community and therapeutic workshops, are set to be more officially launched in the northern location in coming months but there are already ways for the community to benefit from the service with fortnightly morning teas already underway.
“A big part of what we do and the intent of those morning teas is to actually reduce social isolation for our community, and we’ve seen at our Warilla site that’s grown from five or six women to as many as 40 a few weeks ago,” Ali said.
“There’s no pressure; we’re not here to sell you anything; it’s just come along, meet people, see what we do and as we roll out new programs that become available, you’ll have access to that and just a safe space.”
“You can just come in here and have a cup of tea and just get away from everything.”
But while the centre is footing the bill in the meantime, funding will be vital for the sustainability and longevity of these services to ensure all areas of the community have access to facilities they need and deserve.
“At this very moment in time we would just be happy with some operational funding so we could staff it, and we wouldn’t need a huge amount for that,” Ali said.
“Longer term we want the State Government to invest in a permanent site, a large site that is fully staffed like our southern site so we can increase our services.
“We know that the incidents of DV and breaches of AVOs are much higher in Wollongong and Northern Illawarra than they are in the south so we would expect that service to really target and customise it to the clients that come to us here.”
To find out more visit the Illawarra Women’s Health Centre website.
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