27/04/2023
Zerosu***de community awareness program have made the decision in late march to terminate running Our men's situational distress program at Caloola farm.
There is 2 main reasons for this.
1. Zerosu***de leadership team worked from January till Feb 1st advertising and promoting a safe space for men with 100s of hours an $ to prepare and promote the facilities as a safe space for men. The President and secretary literally gave up their career and moved to Caloola to make this happen. Our President was contacted via text message in late march as to giving "exclusive use" to a women's group ".
Phone calls were refused by the owner and every thing turned to text message only.
2. We opened on Feb 1st and started to push publicly about this new safe space. We were getting bookings for April and also had our grand opening planned with senators attending and 12 bookings through the month of April. (April was fully booked with our capacity). To get a message 41 days into a growing program for men ,we were completely disappointed and disheartened that we would have to tell struggling men they were have to look elsewhere due to being asked to give exclusive rights to a women's group.
The local community and zerosu***de were funding this project and doing all the work.
11k was spent from zerosu***de community awareness program with minimal sponsorship and zero grant's.
After 7 days of non response phone calls and text messages during this 7 day period the executive of zerosu***de su***de made the conscious decision to go back to our normal work efforts of advocacy and continuing our fight for reducing the su***de rate in men as we have in the past.
Basically Caloola farm owners let us spend 3 months building the program up to simply tell us now its done and operating you need to find somewhere else to go while we run a women's program.
Zerosu***de community awareness program are currently focused on mens su***de prevention and this was simply a kick in the guts to our work.
The entire reason zerosu***de took on this facility was for a mens only situational distress unit as agreed 👍.
Yet to be told 41 days in there's a possible equation that we may have to leave to give exclusive use to a women's group, TOTALLY DEFEATED WHY ZEROSUICIDE GAVE UP SO MUCH .
Zerosu***de community awareness program are still working hard on change as allways. We had to step back from this opportunity as anyone would.
We didn't run this program to be told 41 days into our efforts that we would need to give it up to for a period of time to give the new clean and functional supported facility up to a women's group and cancel bookings for at risk men.
Kind regards ✨️