A letter to service providers in the Cairns area

Dear Service Provider

This letter serves to introduce you to Alan Webster Consultancies. Alan Webster Consultancies is committed to helping service providers value add to their service mandates by offering a range of professional services including:

1. Educational and in-service training. These opportunities are offered in two main ways. The first is the opportunity to participate in a variety of workshops which have been organized to commence from March this year (see attached). These workshops target a variety of service providers, from support workers to professionally trained workers and from new workers to managers. We hope this range of educational opportunities provides a means for your organization to engage in the training and support of new and experienced workers. You will see that some workshops have an additional optional day attached for practitioners to work in a direct way with Dr. Galloway to help them link the workshop training to their specific caseload needs and organizational mandates and expectations. The second way in which educational and in-service opportunities can be engaged will be through you contacting Alan Webster Consultancies directly and discussing your unique in-service training needs. Workshops will then be developed to service these needs with your targeted group.
2. Professional Supervision. Professional supervision is a process whereby an organization out-sources its professional supervision of staff to Alan Webster Consultancies. Supervision is an activity which engages practitioners in critically exploring their work practices through understanding, among other things:

   • the mesh of theory with practice. This enables workers to clearly articulate a rationale based in professional literature and research for their chosen work based practices;
   • how their everyday work meshes with the mandate of the organization including the policies their organization is implementing on behalf of government or government bureaucracies;
   • the mesh of practice with organizational structures, protocols and expectations;
   • workplace relationships, including use of self in the workplace;
   • how to work across organizations in a whole-of-government approach to service delivery;
   • how to manage stress and workplace expectations while maintaining a healthy work-life balance.

   Professional supervision provided by Alan Webster Consultancies enables an organization to ensure that employees are provided impartial professional support in articulating and developing socially just, professionally defensible and skilled approaches to their practice at whatever level of their employment in the organization.

   Professional supervision may also be engaged whereby staff train with Dr. Galloway in particular practices (such as family and narrative therapy, case management, and processes helpful for working with Indigenous people) and then continue in a supervisory relationship with her to implement these practice frameworks in their everyday work. In this direct practice type of supervision, it is expected that staff and Dr. Galloway work together with particular service users. In this way, workers see the consultant/educator implementing particular theories while simultaneously being actively engaged in building their own skills in working with their client group. Alan Webster Consultancies recognizes that clients can be individuals, families, groups and communities.

3. Project Work.

   It is intended that Alan Webster Consultancies engage with organizations to help them develop, implement and evaluate specific projects which value-add to the practical work, mission and mandate of their organization. Projects may be developed at both unique and complementary levels of service provision. At the unique level, for example, projects may include working with a specific organization to help the organization develop and articulate itself as a learning organization. Alan Webster Consultancies is particularly engaged with the work of Peter Senge in this enterprise and seeks expressions of interest by organizations truly committed to helping staff work from a vision of their worksite as a learning organization, through processes which put this vision into practice. This type of project could include full documentation of this work, as a report to the organization, and/or as the basis for publishing the work of the organization in professional journals.

   Unique projects will only be limited by our imagination to help develop our organization, our service providers, our service users and our community. Unique projects include all of those things that your organization has thought about doing, but perhaps has not had the personnel, resources or time for developing, implementing and documenting, and for which an outside consultant may be used in the day to day running and overall management of the project.

   Complementary projects are those which more than one organization may be involved with at the same time. For example, because of both its clinical and academic experience, Alan Webster Consultancies is interested in working with a range of service providers and users. One project in which service providers may be interested is that of collecting data about how and what a range of service users, their families and the community say is most helpful to them in their life when confronting particular issues and needs. Alan Webster Consultancies could be utilized by, for example, aged care service providers in working with elderly clients and/or their family members in helping them document their life histories through archiving these histories through journaling, scrap booking, diarizing, committing to disk myriad photos and stories of their lives. Part of this account could be about their journey into the later stages of life and the things that were helpful/unhelpful/funny/poignant (etc) at these times. This type of project might engage Alan Webster Consultancies for 30 days per year with 2 groups of service users (including with service providers present in order to gain skills of engaging this work, if desired by the organisation). This project could be written into a publishable form under the name of both the consultancy and the auspicing agency. This type of project enables the service organization to demonstrate its active work with direct service users in helping clients make sense of their lives as a coherent whole; its outreach to families (since histories and possibly all of those old photos and mementos will be collated into some order for them to truly remember their older family members when they pass); its commitment to accountable practice since all work will be documented, and to itself in finding ways to help elicit helpful practices in working with the elderly and their families, through understanding whole contexts of people’s lives.

   Clearly this type of project could be run with many other organizations and service users. For example, families living with disability or mental health issues, might welcome the opportunity of engaging in this type of project which would be run from a strengths based perspective, trying to help families elicit their strengths, tenacity and resilience as a family with a disabled or mentally ill family member. Similarly foster carers might wish to engage this type of project which would help them develop ways of actively and physically storying a child’s life while in their care in order that the foster child be given and encouraged to participate in documenting their whole story as a coherent, rather than disjointed whole. Organizations working with migrants and refugees might also find the usefulness in having a project which helps their target group story their lives in non-intrusive, practical ways and in so doing discover the rich and complex lives of migrants and refugees and the things that have been more or less helpful to them upon arrival in Australia, which information can be used to improve service delivery. Organisations seeking to engage Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples might also find this non-intrusive form of storying mutually beneficial to the clients and to the organization.

   While organizations themselves (individually) will contract with Alan Webster Consultancies in these types of complementary projects to be delivered to a specific target group, a number of organizations engaging the same type of project would lead to the possibilities for discovering the complementarities and gaps in service delivery to particular service user groups in our community. This could act as a means for working together in a “joined-up” or “whole-of-government” type of way (as per expectations of COAG and the Productivity Commission) to inform the sector as a whole about the common and unique needs of a range of service users in Cairns. In putting this example forward, we are not implying that this type of work is not already being engaged directly by an organization, or is not a possibility for an organization to run on its own without an outside consultant. Rather, we are suggesting this as an example, of work that perhaps an organization can envisage, but for which it does not have the personnel or time to run on its own from inception to documentation. We would love to hear your ideas for complementary project work as well as unique projects.

4. Organizational process consultancy. Many organizations, at some point, develop issues in what the literature calls “process” or “maintenance functions” or “staff relationships”. An agency may be clear about its mandate, about the actual work (tasks) it is expected to carry out, and may indeed carry these functions out at an acceptable level, but be hampered in its overall functioning through inter-staff conflict or an organisational culture which is not aligned with the mission statement or vision of the organization. These conflicts have detrimental effects on the organization, with managers spending most of their time dealing (or attempting to deal) with staff issues, staff feeling undervalued and perhaps overwhelmed and unsupported (etc.). Alan Webster Consultancy has experience in working with organizations in these predicaments through undertaking workplace assessments and engaging with staff in negotiating workplace interventions, processes and monitoring tools for regaining “process” or “relationship” equilibrium. A report of all work is provided to the organization at the assessment, intervention and evaluation stages of this consultancy work.
5. Evaluation of programs. Evaluation is important as a self –reflective tool and as a tool of transparency to demonstrate the work undertaken by an organization and to articulate its impact upon the lives of service users. Evaluation of programs may be instigated by an organization itself or be part of a stipulated objective attached to funding opportunities. Alan Webster Consultancies is experienced in the evaluation of service sector programs. We look forward to hearing from you about your evaluation needs.
6. Clinical Case Consultancy. Dr. Galloway has clinical experiences in all schools of family therapy, including narrative therapy. These forms of therapy enable the real social and political contexts of peoples’ lives to be accounted for at all levels of practice including assessment, intervention planning; intervention; evaluation and termination stages. She is available as a clinical case consultant to attend case conferences; case planning meetings; case management meetings (etc.).
7. Friday afternoons at Redlynch. Alan Webster Consultancies offers, free of charge, to all professional helping personnel the opportunity to participate in professional development Friday afternoon sessions once per month, of two hours duration from 3.00pm – 5.00pm, at Redlynch Junior Soccer Club, every fourth Friday of the month from April 2009. These sessions will consist of practitioners (who could be social workers; community workers; psychologists, lawyers; psychiatrists; medical personnel; allied health professionals) presenting a paper of their work based practices and insights, to the wider helping professional community in Cairns. Dr. Galloway is interested in helping people write up their work into a publishable format for professional journals. This will enable Cairns practitioners to share their vast experience, knowledge, unique insights and contexts with their contemporaries in other places. Please let us know if you are interested in presenting some of your work based practices at this forum.

In this letter we have outlined the seven major drivers of Alan Webster Consultancies. These are those of educational and in service training; professional supervision; project work; organizational process consultancy; evaluation of programs; clinical case consultancy and Friday afternoons at Redlynch. We look forward to partnering with you in these endeavours from March 2009. Please contact us at that above telephone and e-mail addresses regarding your organizational needs, at your earliest convenience.

Yours Faithfully

Dr. Greta Galloway
B.A B.Soc. Admin M.Soc.Sc Grad. Cert Ed Ph.D MAASW
Director

Mr. Alan Webster
B.A B.Ed M.Ed.
Administrative Director