Welcome to another bulletin for 2024.
Attendance.12 including our 2 speakers, and Joanne, a neighbor of David Jones,who owns and runs a 15 room villa in Mt Eden, Eclipse Retreat for social housing for 15 men, for whom the government pays her $550 weekly as fullboard. (Her husband thought they were buying it for him to use for practicing!).
Rules are; no booze, no drugs and no woman, as all three seem to cause problems.
House seems to be a social service provider for which Joanne receives no support nor supervision. Interesting.
Apologies. For the next week or so, being Don and Phil( in Europe), Max off to USA, as is Greg , and Rory, Avis, Wendy, and David Hogan in South Island.
Presidential Announcements.
Please note that meeting on 7th August, even though the first of the month, will not be La La Cafe, as we have the Beca Ryla attendees visiting at our normal time of 7am at Parnell Hotel.
Malcolm reported that our garden project is receiving some interest from other clubs and Henry is in process of planting 4 orange trees with more fruit trees planned.
21st August Downtown Club has a meeting on "water and the environment".
Sergent Colleen.-auctioned a cheeseboard supplied by Habitat for Humanity, the charity connected with Avis's curtain collecting programme.-Friday's IT outage-All blacks vs Fiji-Joe Biden not running(who would have predicted that?)
Speakers were Emily Duncan, a counsellor at Grace Foundation's Parnell House and Harriet, one of Grace Foundation's residents who is now part of their staff.
Emily has a background in rehabilitation-grew up in the slums of Manila, the daughter of missionaries-moved to Australia at age 13-then 13 years of addiction-went onto rehab-reconnected with herself and established a purpose in life-then went to university and then started working with Grace Foundation.
70% Maori residents-basis of counselling is "a hand up not a handout"-programme based on a wrapround support, transitioning back to family, group therapy, education, developing tools to cope.
Also courses for couples to help parenting-developing leadership courses.
Grace involved in therapudic healing covering over 700 people-healthy conflict resolution-training facilitators to help their own people-presently work is volentary but hoping to pay them for community healing in the future.
Starting to do work with homeless university students.
Harriett is a "graduate"of Grace Foundation-had been born into gangs-now established in a home in Otara-"Grace is a very safe place to be"-has been there for 2 years.
Meeting closed at 8.32.
