HMA 2018 Round-Up

We have had a fantastic year. Heartfelt thanks go to the agencies and organisation that have placed trust in HMA to work with their staff. From large delivery and design projects to working with dedicated staff on the front line, we have been very pleased to work with passion and integrity to bring out the best in people.

This year we realised a long-term dream. For many years we have wanted to design a state of the art family violence intervention program for men. We have finally got there with our Disrupting Family Violence Program which is both media and visually rich. This evidenced-based intervention brings together the best ideas of what works. There are a number of agencies who have now adopted this program as their preferred choice. As family violence work becomes more complex, there has been a real need to get away from psychoeducational/telling approaches and be much more responsive to the diversity of issues that sits any program room. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that telling people what to do actually makes them worse and leads to more lateral violence.

The majority of our work this year has been Australian-based. We have continued to host significant e-learning modules for Queensland Corrective Services (Introduction to Corrections, Core skills for working with offenders, Immediate risk needs assessment, sentence management, sentence administration, to name a few). In addition to facilitator program training for the Making Choices for Women and Parole Report Writing (PBAR) workshop, we delivered motivational interviewing training to 120 senior staff.  The first phase of this program was a five-day program run over a three month, where participants developed internal proficiency in motivational interviewing before learning to coach others. Early 2019 will see phase two of this project roll out with 1200 staff accessing online modules around motivational interviewing. The 120 coaches will then act as support for staff accessing the online modules. We also continue to provide online learning in the motivational interviewing space for New Zealand Corrections.

With family violence well and truly on the agenda in many states throughout Australia, we were very pleased to train staff from three prisons sites for an early 2019 implementation of the HMA designed Disrupting Family Violence program. This eighteen-month pilot program will target incarcerated family violence-prone men in Southern Queensland. Ken recently met with the Queensland Parole Board to talk about the program design, aims and what the program was seeking to achieve. Anglicare Brisbane has also adopted the HMA Disrupting Family Violence Program in two community sites. They have just completed the first run through the program.

HMA has had a strong relationship with Corrections Victoria for several years and continues to train around the Changeabout Program (family violence) and Foundational Group Facilitation. This year we also ran on their behalf, two workshops titled, “Working with Complex FV Offenders” for community-based providers.  We also completed work on the Corrections Victoria Motivational Interviewing Pilot Program in the Grampians region of Victoria. This two-year project is now in the evaluation phase. We wait with interest the outcomes. Also, we have supported Port Phillip Prison and Fulham Prison teams to implement family violence awareness training across its site. This has included a blended learning option with face-to-face contact for frontline staff as well as online learning. We continue providing workshops on family violence and motivational interviewing for Northern Territory Corrections staff. This has been part of a multi-year contract.

HMA has always had an interest in the area of youth offending. We had the opportunity this year to contribute to designing to programs for justice health around youth family violence and youth driving offending. These criminogenic design programs were designed to fill a significant gap in service delivery for this cohort.

We had the opportunity this year to support VicRoads in their rollout of the new drink and drug driver program. HMA staff provided upskilling in the areas of motivation work for those providing the new programs. Given the new design is much more interactive rather than didactic, it was deemed necessary to ensure staff met required levels of competency. To that end, we also ran people through the VASE-R (Video Assessment of Simulated Encounters – Revised) which assesses competency in motivational interviewing.

HMA has always had a strong interest in supporting community providers and were pleased to support Anglicare, Southern Queensland by running a series of one-day Family Violence and a one-day Introduction to Motivational Interviewing workshops. Also, SPEAQ, a family violence practitioner network in Queensland has sponsored a series of four-day intensive workshops for practitioners which we have facilitated. We have continued to run our one day Disrupting Family Violence Workshop for a range of community networks which normally get between 50 and 100 participants. Our ongoing relationship of supporting family violence intervention with Mission Australia, Western and Hunter region continues to remain strong.

As noted most of our work has been Australian-based during 2018. Two delightful pieces of work this year have been on the east coast of the North Island of New Zealand. Te Taiwhenua O Heretaunga is an iwi-based organisation located in Hastings providing health and social services. We were delighted to provide group work facilitation training for the program team. We return before the end of the year for a further two-days on motivational interviewing. While on the East Coast we have the opportunity to work with E Tu Wairoa where we ran a whanau/family violence focused workshop for community providers. We also ran a motivational interviewing workshop for Wesley Mission in Wellington region who support significant reintegration work for Corrections clients. Regarding supporting offenders, HMA also assisted CareNZ in the design of a new program as part of its prison-based contract for New Zealand Corrections.

On a more serious matter, global warming continues to dominate world politics. HMA made a commitment several years ago to offset our carbon emissions given the amount of travel that we are involved. We see this as being a global citizen. This year, as Enviro-Mark solutions celebrate their first ever Outstanding Performance Awards, HMA was elated to be recognised for achieving outstanding results against our programme requirements.

As you can see it has been an intense year for our team. Firstly, I want to thank our team members for their continued professional delivery across several sites and agencies. Secondly, I want to thank those who supported HMA to provide service to their organisation. We wish everyone a safe and restful Christmas and look forward to yet another exciting year during 2019.

As for me, I am looking forward to more time on my tractor over Christmas (hence the photo above). I’m also sure that my dog Sylvie will also enjoy more time with her human (check the photo).

Ken McMaster

Director

Hall McMaster & Associates (HMA)

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