Member Spotlight : Women’s and Girls’ Emergency Centre (WAGEC)

NCOSS spoke to Women’s and Girls Emergency Centre CEO Nicole Yade.

1. Around 3,000 people turned out for Walk for WAGEC at Centennial Park this year. What did seeing that crowd mean to you?

We were so thrilled. It is just lovely to see good souls in the community chipping in and wanting to help, and calling for change, because this is a national crisis. We all want to see less violence in the community.

There were so many men there, which felt really positive, and lots of young people as well. It felt very hopeful.

I think this was our seventh or eighth walk. I always get confused because one was scheduled during COVID and didn’t go ahead. But it has been going quite a while now, and we have raised $1.2 million so far. That will help a lot of women and children.

2. WAGEC turns 50 next year. Can you tell us where the organisation came from?

WAGEC, the Women’s and Girls’ Emergency Centre, was started by a woman named Jeannie Devine. She was widowed, had a little baby and other children with her, and became homeless. Through her own lived experience of homelessness, she saw how the systems were letting women and children down.

When she was a bit further through that experience herself, she established WAGEC to help more women and children navigate homelessness.

It began as a drop-in centre on George Street. From the earliest days, Jeannie would work with the women no one else would take on, and we are really proud of that. She worked with women doing sex work, with trans women, with people sleeping rough, and she tried to help them get the response they needed from the service system.

Today we run services in the prevention of violence. We run women’s refuges, which is probably what we are best known for, and we also work in the healing and recovery space. There are a number of different programs going.

3. Your ‘From Now’ program supports women leaving prison. How did it come about?

We are just out of the pilot phase now. We were initially funded to run the pilot by the Judith Neilson Foundation, and we don’t receive any government funding for this work, so it is philanthropy that helps us get it done.

What we do is get pregnant women out of prison. So many women who are incarcerated are sadly Aboriginal women, and it is mostly young Aboriginal women who are pregnant that we support to leave prison, so they can have their babies in the community with the right care and support, and so they are not homeless.

The idea came from a gap we saw in our more mainstream refuges. We were getting referrals from women’s prisons, but demand for those vacant rooms in the community was so high that there was a real ethical pain in holding a room for a week for someone who might or might not get out. Every night, we could be filling that room with another woman who needed it. So we decided to set up a service specifically for women leaving prison, which meant we weren’t taking any other rooms offline for the women in the community who needed them.

When you hear the stories about how women who are incarcerated give birth, it is really horrific. Some people are still shackled to a bed, sometimes with guards present in the room. And then babies are removed from their mother’s care and put into foster care, because Mum has to go back to prison. It is so much better for everyone if we can divert those women out of incarceration and into a program like From Now, where they have the right holistic care and support, they can have their baby in hospital like everyone else, and they have a safe place to come back to afterwards.

We have seen those young mums really thrive. We haven’t had a baby removed from someone’s care. It is a really special little program.

It is only five rooms at the moment, one refuge, and the demand for it is so great. We would love to scale it. But it is a start, and you have got to start somewhere.

4. You began your career working with unaccompanied refugee minors and have spent more than 25 years in frontline work. What have you carried from those early years into how you lead WAGEC now?

I have worked in trauma my whole professional life, and trauma across cultures seems to be where I have ended up. In those early years I was working with young Aboriginal people and unaccompanied refugee minors, and I think those young people taught me the importance of relationships, and of building trusting, non-judgemental relationships with people.

We call it the therapeutic alliance now. You can run a program and tick the boxes in terms of doing certain tasks, but if the relationship with your clients isn’t there, it doesn’t work. Real change and transformation happen when there is more authenticity, genuine care and compassion, and a way of showing up that honours the people we work with.

I hope I don’t sound too hippy-dippy. But that is what I believe. How we turn up matters.

5. What are the biggest challenges facing WAGEC at the moment, and have they changed over time?

Funding is always the challenge. Sometimes people say to me, “Nic, you have worked in trauma all these years, you must be exhausted.” But honestly, it is not the client work that exhausts me. It is the systems that exhaust me, and the resources not always being there to do the work we know makes a difference. It is never the clients that wear you out. It is the navigation of all those systems.

When philanthropists or donors come through the refuge, they will talk to us about the impact we are making, and we can speak to that. There are so many success stories in the client work our team does every day. But give me a mental health system that is working, or a housing system that is working, or a health system or an immigration system that is working, and I would be able to show you a lot better outcomes.

So often the accountability for outcomes sits with us as NGOs rather than with those big systems that have a lot more resources than we do. I hope it never sounds like I don’t want to be accountable for what we are doing and for good outcomes, because that is part of our job. But what we do is pretty extraordinary, and the same goes for so many services that are NCOSS members. Given the resources we have, we are doing really well. Gee whiz, though, those systems could do a bit better.

6. You keep coming back to lived experience. Why does that matter so much to you?

It is the thing I always try to get in. There is so much lived experience in our sector, and our sector is better off for it. It makes a difference.