Health services are getting harder to access and costing more. You can help others make big improvements to their health and happiness.

What do we do?

We help establish, develop and strengthen support groups for people with mental illness, disability, chronic illness, genetic conditions, rare diseases, refugee groups and many more.

If people are interested in joining with others to start a health or related support group, we'll show them how.

People looking to join a support groups can contact us and we will help them find one (if it exists).

We work with individual groups to help them achieve improvements to health and wellbeing eg.

• We have assisted a group of people living with mental illness, addiction, and poverty in a social housing complex, to build a community garden and meeting space in the middle of a concrete jungle.
• Gathering broad community support, we helped a group of refugee women, who had never seen a sewing machine before, to learn to sew their own and their children's clothes.
• We have assisted a new spinal injuries group to find a suitably accessible place to meet, make a video to showcase their story, apply for grants for IT equipment so they can support their peers isolated in rural areas.
• We helped a regional cancer support group acquire up to date videos and books on living better with cancer.

Why do we do this?

People join support groups to help themselves. When they are quite unwell, sometimes they just need a bit of an extra hand.

Sharing information and emotional support helps break down social isolation, and reduces loneliness and depression. People share a sense of "belonging", and feel safer in the knowledge that they are not alone. The more people take charge of their own health and wellbeing, the less need for hospitalization, and emergency callouts, and less drain on the taxpayer dollar.

How will the funds be used?

Your donation will help to:

• Provide practical equipment to help people learn new skills
• Maintain an up to date online register of over 2000 Queensland Support Groups, so anyone in the community, at no cost, can easily find a support group to help them.
• Train group leaders in the skills they need to run effective groups
• Provide groups with an experienced worker to help them identify what they need to improve health and wellbeing, and the steps they need to take to set about achieving it.