SERVICES
Berry Street delivers the highest quality services for our clients and communities
While the core of our work continues to be children and young people harmed by violence , abuse and neglect , our services now extend across Victoria and to other adults where violence and abuse have caused great harm .
In 2013 / 14 , we worked with over 27,000 people . What appears below is just a snapshot of some of the great work our staff and volunteer carers do every day .
BERRY STREET ANNUAL REPORT 2014
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Community
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The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has , understandably , increased the work of Open Place , the Victorian support service for Forgotten Australians . 2,600 adults are now registered with Open Place and were supported by 4,484 counselling sessions , 827 record searches and private sessions with the Royal Commission
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Eight hundred and seventy six ( 876 ) people benefited from the ANZ matched savings program , Saver Plus , 428 were assisted through financial counselling and 524 through Emergency Relief
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Early Learning is Fun – With support from the Dara Foundation , we continued our critical work with the Afghani , Karen and South Sudanese communities and engaged 225 families and 373 pre-school children
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With the withdrawal of support for the Bushfire Recovery program , we are reviewing our role in Murrindindi through Connect for Kids
Education
This year we celebrated 10 years of the Berry Street School . Established in 2003 in Noble Park with the support of the Felton Bequest , we never imagined that 10 years later we would have 165 students enrolled across three campuses ( Noble Park , Morwell and Shepparton ).
And , more importantly , that we can measure the students ’ academic achievement – a fabulous average of 1.8 years improvement in literacy and numeracy in just one year .
We continue to learn more about how to get through to very traumatised young people , whose experience of school has been very poor and have faced so many barriers to learning .
Building on strengths
Jake ’ s Story
Jake is a student at our Berry Street School . He started school just 3 weeks ago , and mentioned continuous thoughts of selfharm . The school created a very clear safety plan for him and the Berry Street School teacher , Julie , started character lessons with him . Together , Julie and Jake identified that humour was Jake ’ s signature strength . Every day Julie talked about this with him : ways to practice humour , when to notice humour , opportunities to lift other people up with humour . Julie told us last week that Jake looked at her and said “ No one has ever seen me the way you see me . No one has ever noticed that I ’ m good at something and that ’ s humour . And no one has ever tried to make me better by focusing on my strength ”.