Speak Out April 2020 DIGITAL VERSION. pdf

Justice & mental health

In 2017, Rosalie (Rosie) Martin was awarded Tasmanian Australian of the Year for her voluntary work developing the literacy skills of adults incarcerated in Risdon Prison. Three years on, Mary Woodward, Speech Pathology Australia’s Senior Advisor, Justice and Mental Health, caught up with Rosie to find out what has been happening since then. Q: Receiving such a prestigious award must have been an incredible honour, and was in recognition of the work you were already doing, but has it helped to create other opportunities? It was and it has! It increased my access to people who can help make things happen. In 2013 I founded a charity as the vehicle for the volunteer literacy intervention I had begun at the Tasmanian prison. That charity is now named Connect42. I am now one in an incredible team without whom little further would have happened. Since the award, one of the fabulous opportunities has been to run two reflective symposia about low-literacy challenges in Tasmania. Communicating: The Heart of Literacy , in November 2018, focused a diverse group of Tasmanians on this challenge of low-literacy. It was convened by Connect42 and hosted by Her Excellency, our wonderful Governor Kate Warner – and Connect42’s patron. Reflective dialogue processes supported the group to share meaning and extend collaboration on this topic. A shared goal of #100PercentLiteracy burst from the participants at the end of the day. Grassroots dialogue yielded a strong direction and call-to-action. Connecting: The Heart of Literacy , September 2019, focused on the systems-changes, thought-changes and actions needed to achieve #100PercentLiteracy in Tasmania. Building on connections begun at these symposia, Connect42 is now co- designing and supporting a number of collaborative pilots and projects. Q: Are you still delivering the literacy program at Risdon prison/elsewhere? Just Sentences is the literacy-intervention program I initiated as a volunteer in 2013. Because of the attention needed to establish other projects, I have had less opportunity to do direct literacy work in the prison myself – though I have been doing this work in two homelessness services. We have made recent submissions to activate an updated iteration of Just Sentences. Q: Have you received any feedback on it? I receive constant feedback of amazement that the Just Sentences men learned to read and write as quickly as they did. When I began, I didn’t appreciate how amazing people would find this. With our SLP lens, it is the progress we would expect. Rosie keeps providing hope to the vulnerable

Q: Have you been involved in the delivery of any other programs in justice settings in Tasmania? Our “darling” is the Just Time parent-child attachment program. It uses speech pathologists to deliver the Circle of Security Parent DVD Program® (COS-P) in the prison. It started when I delivered COS-P at the prison as a volunteer in 2014. In June 2018, it gained government funding. We are grateful that from volunteer beginnings, the program is now embedded. We are doing the background work to keep this funding going. Q: Have there been any evaluations of the programs? An external evaluation of Just Time was completed by the University of Tasmania in December 2019. The evaluators concluded: “This is an excellent program that provides hope, skills and capacity to a particularly vulnerable population… It is an intervention that is making a difference, within an environment that is generally difficult when it comes to the successful delivery of potentially life changing programs.” We are so proud of our incredible team of SLP facilitators! Just Moving On will provide continued language, literacy and connection support to men and women after they leave prison. I wrote an extensive plan for it four years ago. Now, the evaluation of Just Time has specifically recommended the type of ongoing support that Just Moving On intends! Connect42 has funded a "mini" version of Just Moving On to help build proof-of-concept. One of our speech pathologist facilitators has been working with one woman since that woman’s release from prison 14 months ago: “(Participant) has been attending literacy sessions since her release from prison… (she) has had a couple of arrests since release but has not been back in prison. She messages or phones me now if she can’t get to a session which shows how much value she places on the sessions. She was able to say in court recently that she was working on her literacy and messaged me to say she wanted to see me more… It’s a rocky road as her life is very complicated but we’ve been ‘together’ all year which I suspect is one of the longest relationships that she’s had.” Lisa Johnson Q: Have you received much interest from people in other states and territories? I’ve had calls and emails from across the world and made presentations at a number of criminology conferences. I’m part of a global network of practitioners using COS-P in corrections contexts. And, Circle of Security International has invited Connect42 to collaborate in further awareness-raising about this work.

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April 2020 www.speechpathologyaustralia.org.au

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