By Anglican Family Care | Posted: Thursday April 9, 2020
As we pass the halfway point of the initial four-week lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and head into the Easter break, I thought I would share an update on how Anglican Family Care is continuing to work.
The challenges have been many, but there is a real willingness amongst our team to find ways of keeping purposeful connection with whānau. We have also emphasised the need to stay connected as an agency. Regular meetings using video conferencing have been invaluable, and we were able to join together as an agency, which was fantastic in the midst of all this isolation (I won’t mention the dancing…) It means we can provide a cohesive response, and ensures our workers feel supported and connected and that we are familiar with the issues facing each of the communities we support. The work is not ours alone, so linking with our wider community has also been fundamentally important. There is some outstanding work being done within the social service and community sector in Otago.
We are so very grateful to those who continue to support the agency. There have been some wonderful initiatives thought up as ways to assist those who need it, and we are sorry we haven’t been able to harness all of them. You can be certain our focus has not waivered, and we continue to assess need as it arises and think about ways in which we can meet it. The restrictive environment we find ourselves in simply means we must continue to think differently about how we can respond, a challenge borne out of necessity.
Finally, I am very pleased that the Government has approved the Easter Bunny as an essential service. I have a feeling there will be much chocolate associated self-medicating by those in our team fortunate enough to receive a visit this weekend. They deserve it. Easter brings with it a message of hope and we must continue to believe that the daily sacrifices we are all making now offer hope for a relatively smooth transition back to something resembling normality.
Stay safe, stay home and stay well.
Noho ora mai
Mike