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Stories from the front line: Amanda Whelan from knowmore

One of the many issues highlighted by the chaos of 2020 is the critical importance of workplace wellbeing, particularly for those in frontline service delivery. Our Partnerships Director Lottie Turner recently spoke with Amanda Whelan, Director of Client Services at knowmore, about her work supporting practitioner wellbeing and resilience.

Lottie: Thanks for speaking with us, Amanda. Can you start by telling us a little bit about your role at knowmore and how you came to be in it?

Amanda: knowmore is a free national legal service that supports survivors of institutional child sexual abuse who are considering their redress and other compensation options. Being able to work effectively with trauma survivors is essential for us, as is staying well in our work. We use a trauma-informed, culturally safe approach and a multidisciplinary model to do that. This means we have a number of teams who all weave together to wrap around our clients. I’m the Director of Client Services, which means I share leadership for our service delivery with the Principal Lawyer, who leads all of our legal teams nationally and I’m part of knowmore’s executive team. I’m a social worker by qualification. I lead our counselling and social work, Aboriginal engagement, intake and administration and financial counselling teams nationally. I’m also the lead on trauma-informed practice and wellbeing across our organisation.

I joined knowmore in 2015 after working with our client group in another role during the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. I was asked to help backfill a vacancy as a social worker. I said I was happy to do that for a few months while they looked for someone else, but I didn’t think it was really for me. Five years later and I’m still here! And glad the ‘someone else’ turned out to be me.

Lottie: Why is supporting a culture of wellbeing and resilience so important to you?

Amanda: I’m probably like most practitioners of my era (and I don’t just mean social workers); I’ve had horrendous personal experiences of burnout and vicarious trauma earlier in my working life, to the point that I found myself unable to work for a while, crying every day and questioning 10 years in if I still wanted to do this work at all.  And it wasn’t just the impact it was the deep shame and judgement I felt directed at me because I was struggling that really broke my heart.  I had been praised and relied upon to ‘deliver’ and then one day when I suddenly hit that wall (you know ‘the wall’, we’ve all been there…) I felt the weight of others’ disappointment in me, like I’d failed somehow. For a long time, I felt destroyed by that. I hated myself for letting people down.  And then after a bit of time passed, I got so bloody mad! How could we be in the service of others, be working hard all day every day to make people safer, to help heal their trauma, to show compassion and to walk beside them, when we could not do the same for ourselves?  And so, after feeling flattened, and then getting mad I decided on recovery.

I allowed myself to rest, and then I got curious.  What was out there for me – as a person who had chosen to support trauma survivors as their career calling – that might help me make sense of my impacts, protect against them and also help me stay high functioning in my work?  And that’s when I discovered trauma-informed practice, which is a strengths-based framework s founded on five core principles – safety, trustworthiness, choice, collaboration and empowerment as well as respect for diversity. It was just starting to emerge in Australia around that time, and it coincided with me thinking about what clients had been telling the therapeutic world for years; talk-only therapies, CBT etc don’t hold many answers for people who have experienced complex trauma. Discovering neurobiological impacts, understanding the window of tolerance and how there is a system that exists between client and worker, having language not just for client impacts but my own, and also what helps ‘clear’ stress (and what doesn’t, sorry wine and chocolate, we tried…) it just made sense.

I’ve often found myself in leadership roles and so bringing this understanding to the work of others is something I care deeply about; if I can save anyone from my crash and burn experience then I’m all in!  But if they do, then I’m also equally passionate about the ability of people to repair – ‘we are all in recovery’. No-one wants to think they are broken forever.

Lottie: You’ve been leading knowmore’s efforts to ensure workforce wellbeing is at the centre of what you do. Can you tell us about some of the initiatives you’ve been focussed on?

Amanda: First and foremost, it’s about developing and enhancing a trauma-informed culture that supports reflective practice, and highly values the wellbeing of its people (and that’s a team effort!). As a leader in that, I try to focus on two things; ‘fair weather’ supports and keeping wellbeing front and centre in times of change, growth, crisis, high service demand or all of the other fluctuations in any organisation which can mean additional stressors for our staff.  Hello, 2020!

If people want to know what the research and our learnings say about the technical initiatives it’s good to focus on, I’d encourage you to look at Shelter from the Perfect Storm, which is the wellbeing and resilience framework we created for the community legal centre sector. You can sign up for access on our website. In a nutshell, its: external supervision for all client facing staff; group/teams reflection of some kind (understanding parallel process and how trauma can play out in how we work with one another is critical); regular core skills training so all of our people have the skills and confidence they need; a structure of regular meetings and one-on-ones so all staff understand what’s expected of them; and wellbeing can be proactively monitored and engaged with, and of course an employee assistance program.

You can have the greatest framework in the world, but if people don’t feel engaged, it will always have limited success. We are also really transparent during our recruitment and selection process for new people; if you don’t enjoy reflection and staff support, we probably aren’t the place for you.  It’s really encouraging to hear more and more from applicants that it’s part of why they want to work at knowmore because we do offer that support.

Lottie: What would you encourage other leaders to consider when building wellbeing-ready services and organisations?

Amanda:  I think anyone who is even attempting to focus on wellbeing for your workforce will understand me when I say that getting to the initiatives is the easy part!  Most of us know what works, and why it’s a good idea, so when you get to that point there is an absolute wealth of ideas and material out there already to help guide that. What we struggle with is how to make it happen. This requires a few things, but the most important as I see it is organisational commitment from the top down.

You need buy-in from your leadership group from the Board down and this can be achieved in many ways, but probably starts with understanding what language they are most likely to listen in.  Some respond better to risk language, others to mission alignment, or how in the long run helping your staff stay ‘match fit’ means better outcomes for your clients, improving retention rates etc.  But tackle it as a business case because really that’s what you are putting forward.  What is the probable risk/issue you’re trying to prevent, what is the cost (evidence base) if you don’t address it, what does current best practice/research say works, what are you proposing, how much will it cost, how long will it take to implement and how will you know it works? Shelter from the Perfect Storm is a desktop version of that argument for community legal centres.

And then you also need buy-in from your staff group.  It can be tempting to focus on the challenges and where the pressure points already are for people (stress, vicarious trauma, unmet client demands, sector pressures etc) and it’s good to acknowledge those when starting out and how you want to create support for people through reflective practice, but it’s also great to involve people in their own positive contributions to wellbeing and resilience. I am constantly astounded at how creative our staff group is at taking care of themselves! So, we try and highlight that and wherever possible, utilise those skills too. We have yoga instructors, meditation/mindfulness devotees, runners, crafters, gym smashers, gardeners, hula hoopers… I could go on. But the idea that there are five things you need to do to release stress hormones from the body (laugh, cry, sweat, sleep, intentional deep breathing) is a great place to start when it comes to educating people and then celebrating what they already do.  My next dream for knowmore is a Resilience Committee which will be totally led by interested staff and hopefully really taps into learning from one another and sharing that.  Wellbeing at work is a partnership.

Lottie: You shared with me an email you sent to your Melbourne-based team in light of the city’s stage 3 lockdown measures in July. I think people across Melbourne, and indeed around the country, would really value reading some of the messages contained in that email. Would you mind sharing some of them with us now?

Amanda:   When talking to our Melbourne team as lockdown round 2 was announced, it was easy to feel the weight of ‘here we go again’ and the fatigue that came with that.  Here are a few things as a leadership group we’ve tried to keep in our messaging to our staff.

  1. Don’t tell yourself a story about what it means if you handle things differently this time around.  You are different, the world is different, and this is different. And that’s okay. Be curious about how you experience it, notice your changes, also look for how you handle things better because of what you have already learned
  2. Remind yourself that you have a whole new toolkit available to you to survive this! What have you learned about your own resiliencies, your work habits, your personal disciplines that have surprised and supported you? What would you want to keep with you when all of this is over?  Write them down, make a visual of them and remind yourself of them, often.  And notice when you might have a few more to add.
  3. Remember that you are not alone. We are all with you in whatever way we can be. Reach out for help if you need it. We are here, and we are listening.  Always.

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