By LACHLAN MOORHEAD
AFTER a decade helping young women in Casey, the team at Angel Light Link is already looking towards the next 10 years.
The Hallam-based charity will this year use a $10,000 Westpac grant to bolster its operations in the municipality and look to provide its own support groups and counselling offices in addition to referring youths to other services.
Angel Light Link President Sally McCracken said her team helped more than 1000 women across 20 schools in Casey, but noted there was an opportunity to provide longer-term assistance.
“Currently our services are all provided from outside our office location; we’re an outreach program,” she said.
“We are linking people in with services but we want to set up support groups and counselling offices ourselves.
“We have new offices in Hallam where we could offer therapeutic support.”
Angel Light Link was created in 2005 to help young women in Casey aged 12 to 18 learn to address and understand health and wellbeing issues including depression, anxiety and self-harm.
“We were seeing a lot of needs for young people in the area, specifically young women, and we did a lot of research to see what was available,” Ms McCracken said.
“Although there were a lot of services out and about, a lot was focused on crisis management instead of intervention and prevention needs.”
Ms MrCracken noted the fast-growing youth population of Casey and how many areas in the region were increasingly being used as a hangout for young women.
“That’s not saying young men don’t struggle with the same issues, they do, but young women and young men deal with same issues differently and approach them quite differently,” she said.
“We’ve been careful in not making it exclusive but with the number of topics we deal with, like body image, girls deal with body image differently to boys for example.”
For more information, visit www.angellightlink.org.
Those in need of immediate assistance or who need someone they can trust to talk to can phone Lifeline on 131 119.
