Great Lakes Women’ shelter opens to the public

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Great Lakes Women’ shelter opens to the public

The Great Lakes Women's Shelter has been forced to keep its location secret for the past six years, but a new purpose-built facility is bringing its work out in the open and allowing it to help more women.

That means that the shelter on the NSW mid North Coast can provide so much more for the women and their children.

When the Great Lakes Women's Shelter opened in 2016, it was split into two rental properties in Tuncurry and Forster.

Their locations had to remain private, which limited the services they could offer.

The shelter can welcome volunteers, specialists, and community members in its secure, fit-for-purpose home.

It means that for the first time ever, we're actually able to have them in the shelter helping out, not just doing stuff outside and in the community, Ms Ravenscroft said.

Ms Ravenscroft said the previous shelters could house five families and were almost always at 100 per cent capacity with a waitlist.

A plan to build a new shelter began four years ago.

Ms Ravenscroft said that we now have the capacity to house 10 families.

This is designed for purpose, so it's got everything that the families need.

More than 500 incidents of domestic violence were reported in the Mid-Coast local government area in 2021, according to the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research.

It was in the top third of the state for the highest rates of domestic violence.

Ms Ravenscroft said the shelter had helped more than 150 women and 200 children since 2016 and she hoped the new facility would double that figure.

Caseworker Beth said that the ability to have more visitors has resulted in more opportunities for intensive child casework and play therapy.

She said that the children in the shelter can display different behaviours because they come from a trauma-based background.

We're able to identify the different behaviours, have the right support come in and help them deal with those situations as well as support the mothers, by having a facility like this.

Staff from a local preschool plan to volunteer their time to visit the shelter and operate as a preschool within the grounds.

The new facility will better support the group's outreach program, known as Willow The program, which aims to support women once they leave the shelter, as they only stay about three months.

The shelter has a six-bedroom house and two two-bedroom villas.

Ms Ravenscroft said she had employed two new staff members, but ideally would like more.

With double capacity for families, we would ideally have double the staff, but funding is restricting that at the moment, she said.

Almost 60 per cent of the families that use the shelter are Indigenous.

The building is covered in Aboriginal art by local Worimi artists.

Beth said that they want to make our Indigenous families feel very comfortable in this space.

The building is almost entirely sustainable, using solar panels and Tesla batteries.

The more than $2 million project was made possible by the Mid-Coast Council leases the land to the group and local, state and federal funding, as well as community donations.