We’ve given a lot of coverage to Centacare North Queensland’s celebration of Anti-Poverty Week but it’s well justified.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Centacare NQ is the social services arm of the Catholic Church and has been operating in the Townsville diocese for almost 40 years and in Mount Isa since 1992.
Centacare NQ currenly has over 150 staff with offices in the north-west in Cloncurry, Mount Isa and Normanton and outreach services in Richmond and Julia Creek.
They provide a range of service including counselling, family support, mediation, disability services, housing and homelessness, youth services, community engagement and professional development.
Their work takes them in among some of the most disadvantaged people in the region so they are ideally placed to run a week of anti-poverty activities.
Poverty and severe hardship affect more than a million Australians, and many of those are disadvanted north Queenslanders.
According to 2010 figures, 15% of Queenslanders in regional and rural areas experience poverty compared with nine per cent living within the greater Brisbane area.
The programs Centacare offer are important as are their referral services, and it was good to see many other social services agencies at the Centacare Eat.Pray.Act dinner in Mount Isa on Thursday.
The day was turned into a fun round of “services bingo” but there was a serious message behind it which is there are many options for those in need.
Similarly it was good to attend the official opening of another Centacare facility in Cloncurry on Wednesday: the new Neighbourhood Centre at Sheaffe St.
The centre will provide many Centacare services in outreach from Mount Isa including information, referral, counselling and support, relationship counselling, educative and support services, child protection services, mental health support, bereavement support and dealing with drought.
Not to mention, being a great facility for the community to become, in Father Mick Lowcock’s words “a new neighbourhood.”
The Catholic Church has often been in the news for the wrong reasons, but in Centacare NQ they have an organisation providing services they can be justly proud of. DB