Community support organisation OUTLine has secured funding from the Auckland District Health Board to employ a fulltime Community Project Worker. The Auckland-based community support organisation is seeking a registered health practitioner with experience in working with the GLBT community. The role is to specifically address the issues of making sure that OUTLine identifies and works with the mainstream services that treat and respect GLBT people best, and to help educate and provide support to practitioners and services about the specific issues around sexuality and gender identity. It's a broad position, which requires someone who can work in the areas of mental health and wellbeing and addiction at both individual and community level. "They will need to have a passion for ensuring that the needs of the rainbow community are validated and recognized within the mainstream services," says OUTLine General Manager Vaughan Meneses. "They will also need to be able to collate and review information from other places and look into research from local and overseas sources to make recommendations about how our services in the field may look in the future. "It is an exciting and challenging role and it will have an instrumental role in shaping the way forward for us." Menese says OUTLine is focused on ensuring that resources are put into the community. "One of the major Mental Health issues we have is a higher rate of depression than the so called ‘general population'; we also have higher rates of problematic use of alcohol and other substances. When it comes to suicide, alcohol is the single biggest common factor involved in the actual attempt. People who kill themselves or attempt to more often than not are drinking at the time," he says. "Providing people within our community access to information and appropriate treatment by having someone ensuring a best practice approach is a vital step towards better wellbeing. Many people believe that we just need to be treated like everybody else. They often fail to see is that ‘everybody else' means being treated as a heterosexual person. We have, under law, the right to have the same level of service as everybody else and that means having access to services that are appropriate to our lives." Meneses says in a recent collation of information from people attending a treatment service in Wellington, 74 percent of people who were from the rainbow community would not disclose that they were GLBT until such time as they felt safe to do so, often relatively late in the treatment process. He says what that means is that people engaging in services overwhelmingly feel that the services themselves still operate with the base assumption that all people are straight. "Information collected by the same people also recorded how many times they were exposed in society and media to anti-gay 'slurs' compared to positive affirmations on being gay. It was found that they were aware on average of 12 anti-gay slurs per day, and an affirming message once every three days." In responding to the observation that OUTLine seems to be going from strength to strength, Meneses responds that OUTLine only exists to ensure that the lives of people from the rainbow community go from strength to strength. "Traditionally we have been focused solely on ensuring that we have a telephone counselling service to provide information and support to people who need it. What has become quite evident over the past few years is that there is also a role for an organisation in the community to take a role in ensuring some of the bigger issues are addressed in a more cohesive way. "There are some fantastic people working within a range of agencies all doing their bit, but often what is lacking is an agency looking after the big picture. We see one of the roles that we can play at OUTLine is to bring all of the bits of the puzzle together to make sure we have it all covered – sometimes this may mean we need to act as leaders, in other cases we just need to be facilitators or participants. We fulfill the needs of our constitution by making sure that things happen, it does not mean that we have to do them all." Meneses says to OUTLine this is the smart way to operate, saying the organisation does not see the need to build an empire or waste vital resources in competing with agencies already doing an ok job, especially when with a bit of assistance they could be assisted and modified to make it exceptional. "However, where we see a gap we will look to plug it and we will assist in providing an overall strategy around some key issues. Working collaboratively rather than competitively will ensure that we get the absolute best services for the lowest level of cost. For instance we will achieve more for our community by changing the culture and approach to our issues by five percent for 20 different organisations, than what we will we will ever be able to do by starting one new one." Find out more about the role here
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News staff
First published: Tuesday, 16th November 2010 - 1:25pm