Esperance community members are banding together to create the Compassionate Community Care Charter Esperance to provide better support for local people.
One of the volunteers behind the charter, Leonie de Haas, told the Kalgoorlie Miner it was about elevating compassion in the community.
“It’s about bringing in compassion for the whole community, being able to listen to the community, getting other community members to listen to people, not just shut them down all the time,” she said.
Ms de Haas said people had all sorts of challenges in their lives and needed support from community members.
On their social media page, the group said Esperance had experienced many challenges and changes and had been affected in many ways.
“Some of those impacts have left lasting scars on the community. For a community to build resilience, it’s important to find common ground and shared values, to underpin cohesiveness and overcome divisiveness,” the group wrote.
When asked what scars the group was talking about, Ms de Haas said major bushfires and the death of people known in the community had affected a “huge portion” of the community.
“People who knew those people, people who just didn’t know them personally, but knew of them, the fact that so many different buildings were wiped out … it had a huge impact on the community,” she said.
“The community needs to be able to grieve for things like that, but to be able to talk about it and talk to people who can have that understanding and empathy about it as well.”
Ms de Haas said losing the old jetty had caused huge angst in the community.
“There’s this grief process there as well, where people need to grieve for something that they consider that they’re losing,” she said.
“Ultimately, it’s going to be a written charter, which will be held by a number of people, one of the things that we are going to do is to give the Shire a copy of the charter.
“But it will be in many, many places where people can read it and get that understanding that they’re not alone, that there are other people out there who can support them, who can help them to grieve through these processes, whether it’s loss of family, loss of something within the community.
“Whether they need to just be able to talk to someone, all they need to do is ask and to have that little bit of compassion for other people when they see someone else in trouble.”
Ms de Haas said the group would be undertaking community consultation and talking to different community groups to form the charter.
“So we’ve given ourselves an end date to have the charter out and written by, I think, it’s the end of December,” she said.
“So our next step is to actually decide what type of consultations that we’re going to do and when and where we’re going to do them.
“So we have a few ideas for them, including the market days, making a time to go and talk to senior citizens, to a few of the service groups within the area … just to get that feel for different groups within the community, different ages, different people who come from different backgrounds.”