DEMAND HIGH FOR SOCIAL SERVICES
CatholicCare Wilcannia-Forbes has had a 42 per cent increase in demand for its services since the declaration of the Coronovirus Covid-19 pandemic.
“I couldn’t be more proud of how quickly our team adapted to make sure support and services were still being delivered at a time when our many communities needed us most,” CatholicCare WIlcannia-Forbes CEO, Anne-Marie Mioche said.
“Not only are we open for business, but these figures of engagement confirm we have had to increase our capacity as people have been very quick to connect with us for the support and service we are renowned for providing.”
“Our team responded quickly and proactively and implemented really engaging new ways of supporting our clients through phone support, web based interactions, video conferencing, social media, online help, in home resource packs and more,” Ms Mioche said.
It seems our 25 years of experience delivering services to some of the most remote and isolated communities in NSW has proved to be the perfect preparation to keep offering much needed social services to our vulnerable communities during the Coronavirus Covid-19 pandemic.
“Our organisation was started in a time of serious drought, to address stress and depression in what is considered the poorest diocese in Australia. We continue to meet these needs by providing a range of parenting and family services, playgroups, housing, domestic and family violence, financial counselling and mental health support from 14 offices and outreach centres covering 52% of NSW.
Due to our team being located remotely, we already had excellent remote communication and planning capabilities and our team were able to transition very quickly from face to face services to providing support and assistance in alternative means.
The innovation and genuine positive problem solving is an absolute credit to our amazing and resilient team members we have who are out facing some community’s largest and hardest issues.
Like all business and charities we have closely monitored the impact Coronavirus would have on our levels of service delivery and volumes of clients. This chart below shows a comparison between client attendance in April 2019 and April 2020.

Based on this simple comparison we discovered many of our programs have recorded a considerable spike, if not doubled, the service and client levels in 2020.