Welcome to another edition of Just News, and for those of us who work on Wurundjeri country – where this newsletter is scribed – welcome to Guling season, where the cold weather eases and the wattle and orchids begin to bloom. 

In this edition: we're commemorating Homelessness Week 2022 and the Feast Day of St Ignatius, connecting with Jesuit Community College's new social media profiles, listening to the latest episode of the Worth A Second Chance podcast, and taking two easy steps on Zoom and in your emails towards our organisational commitment to diversity and inclusion. Stay safe, watch the flowers, and enjoy the edition. 

A reminder to staff in Victoria that we're strongly recommended to work from home if you can, and wear masks in the office around other people, in line with new Victorian Government health advice. Chat to your line manager or general manager with any issues or questions.

Staff in Victoria who are COVID-free and feeling well are invited to our Artful Dodgers Studios' Megaphone music showcase on 11 August – the free event runs from 6-8pm next Thursday, showcasing brilliant live performances from the Studios' participants. Registration is a must.

And if you missed it in Just News 140, Julie Edwards has recommended two simple steps staff can take in line with our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. Please consider adding your pronouns to your email signature (request this through IT Connexions). And on Zoom, pop your pronouns and the First Nations country you're on in your name (click the three dots in the top-right corner of your own image and hit 'rename' to make these additions).

NEWS | Homelessness Week 2022

Homelessness Week 2022 runs from 1-7 August and aims to raise awareness of the impact of homelessness in Australia. It's an issue many of our participants and the staff who support them across our various programs are intimately familiar with. Read a summary and acknowledgement of the housing support we provide on our blog, to learn more about the importance of a safe and stable home to help people turn their lives around.

Andy Hamilton SJ, pictured above, has written a thoughtful reflection to commemorate Homelessness Week. Read about the right to housing, how having a home provides stability and structure, and about what governments can do to ensure the continuing availability of social housing in his new piece at our blog.

UPDATE | Worth A Second Chance podcast

The Worth A Second Chance podcast is back with its second episode, featuring Jesuit Social Services' very own Jes Wikaira from the Youth Justice Community Support Service.

A Maori or Pasifika young person in Victoria’s criminal justice system might have come across Jes – she’s a cultural and intensive support worker who works with and advocates for justice-involved young people who come from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.

In this episode, Jes talks about the culturally safe support she provides to a whole family – not just an individual, in recognition of how Maori families like her own are comprised and understood – and the misconceptions about the people she works alongside that she’d like the wider community to extinguish, to make everyone feel more safe and welcome.

PHOTO | Jesuit Community College is on Facebook and Instagram

Follow Jesuit Community College on its new Facebook and Instagram to be the first to know about their new courses and opportunities. 

Preceda training is on again!

A drop-in training session for Preceda is being held via Zoom between 10-11am this Thursday, 4 August.

Preceda is Jesuit Social Services’ payroll and employee self-service platform. This drop-in session is aimed at helping you navigate this system, including an opportunity to troubleshoot any issues you may be experiencing. Individual times will be allocated to participants so that the session can be guided to your needs when using Preceda. This may include how to:

• Access your payslip
• Project leave into the future
• Update personal details
• For line managers, how to understand workflow approvals and manage team information.

To register for the training: gain approval from your supervisor, email JSS Staff Training and cc your supervisor. The Learning & Practice Development Unit will then register you for the training, and the BSS team will send you an allocated time to join the session.

Training certificates

If you complete a training courses, please send any training certificates (eg First Aid Certificates) to gemba@jss.org.au, as both Vicky Backhouse (who is currently on leave) and Kerry Durrand receive these notifications, and can your upload your certificates to Sentrient.

Internal staff directory

The Quality, Risk and Compliance team is about to review the format and content of the internal staff directory (phone directory). We want to ensure that it is as useful as it can be to all staff, and will focus on ensuring it isn’t just contact details, but helps people understand teams and locations. If there is anything that you like or don’t like about the current directory, something you would like it to include, or a format or style that you would find useful, please send all your feedback to Kerry Durrand by COB on Friday 12 August.

Our Dropping off the Edge research into locational disadvantage received some attention last week – it was mentioned in this Conversation piece about the educational divide between urban and rural areas, and this Pro Bono Australia column about services more generally between cities and regions.

If you missed the live event on 20 July, we recorded the Justice in Jobs webinar, which discussed the role of employment and training as a pathway out of the youth justice system. Watch the full 90-minute recording or the four-minute highlights video. Staying with Worth A Second Chance – our youth justice advocacy campaign which hosted the webinar – here's where you can listen to all episodes of the campaign's podcast.

And to commemorate the 31 July Feast Day of St Ignatius, who founded the Jesuits, we held a reflective online conversation. Andy Hamilton SJ has also written a thoughtful piece about the importance of working with one foot raised, in the Ignatian tradition, to mark the occasion.

“The nuclear family is very different to how Maori and Pasifika families work. So there is a hierarchy... And it also extends to the wider community. So the supports are actually wider. And we also have that same belief that any success is collectively driven. Anything that we do in life, we normally do together and it's looked at as a collective rather than an individual achievement. And so to work with just the young person outside of those types of practices is really difficult. And we find that you're not going to get the same outcomes that you would get if you are working with a family.”

 — Jes Wikaira, Worth A Second Chance podcast, episode 2

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