MHCC ACT Sector Outreach Initiative

Ben Matthews, Sector Development Officer

Hi to all our MHCC ACT members, friends and well-wishers.

First, happy mental month to all. I would like to thank our team here at the MHCC ACT for the arduous work that has gone into a whole month of events and activities.

A special congratulations to our amazing Communications officer Alison who works incredibly hard for many other months to make these weeks a remarkable success.

My role at the MHCC ACT is Sector Development officer and I handle member support, workforce development and training.

As part of the MHCC ACT’s vision for ongoing workforce development for the community mental health sector in the ACT, we are offering opportunities for organisations to access a warm outreach initiative. Some of the opportunities afforded in the initiative might be for myself:

• To meet and support frontline staff and be able to discuss the day-to-day challenges experienced by the most important cohort in the mental health workforce.
• Engage in broad sector feedback as to what training and professional development opportunities are needed to supply quality supports and opportunities to build capacity and career development for a whole of sector workforce.
• To enhance the relevance and reputation of the community mental health sector workforce to government and community.
• Aid organisations troubleshooting service challenges.
• Provide input into management support, systems design, and workplace culture.
• Effectively support the integration of a lived experience workforce as part of a whole of team therapeutic alliance

What will this look like

As a mental health professional, I have worked in many settings including lecturing the CertIV Mental Health and the CertIV Mental Health Peer work and guest lecturing Peer work models of practice at Swinburne University. My previous role with Wellways Australia was to provide a whole of organisation ability to support all staff to understand and work towards embedding high quality recovery-oriented practice in all the work the organisation does.

The MHCC ACT would like to extend the opportunity for our member organisations to take advantage this initiative in the form of a warm outreach program to assist member organisations maintain a high-quality recovery driven services and contemporary recovery-oriented practice.

This Sector Outreach Initiative (SOI) will take place as a pilot program for a period of 6 months. Initially for the purposes of the pilot, access to the initiative will be limited to 4 hours in total per organisation, this need not be used in 1 x 4-hour block. And can be used in smaller allotments more often.

This opportunity will be cost free for members and unavailable to non-members and will provide another workforce development initiative to the sector supports already provided by the MHCC ACT.

For further information and details please Email me at Ben.Matthews@MHCCACT.org.au.