Doomadgee Local Commissioners’ report
The FRC has worked over the last year with the Doomadgee community to gain their trust and educate the community members and service providers on FRC processes and how it can support families.
We as Local Commissioners are growing in confidence with every conference held and are all enjoying the position to support our community. During conferencing our three main focuses are to engage, encourage and assist our clients. We tell them we are not there to growl at them, but that the children of Doomadgee are our future and we aim to support them to create a stronger family life. We know all our clients very well and a lot of them are family. We take pride in our work. Having tough conversations with families has been difficult, but the community is starting to understand how the FRC works, and as a group we do not mind having these difficult conversations. We know it will benefit our community and assist its future growth.
As we have not had the power to income manage, we are using our time with clients to engage them with the excellent range of service providers available in the Doomadgee community. All the service providers that we are working with including the Doomadgee State School, Wellbeing Centre, Child and Family Centre, Community Health and more have been very supportive of us as Local Commissioners and have been proactive with clients that we have referred to them. The Doomadgee community is currently working on a collaborative case management model which will see service providers meet to discuss specific clients and make sure they are receiving the best support possible. We consider this to be very beneficial to our clients and we know, as both community members and FRC Local Commissioners, that some of the dysfunctional households need a wide range of support to work towards a stronger family life.
Our main focus over the last year has been supporting families with their children and specifically focusing on school attendance. We are continuously stressing to our clients the importance of education for our children’s future. We have had a disappointing start to the year with school attendance due to sorry business in our community. We know how important the mourning process is for our families, but at the same time our children should not miss a day of school. A recent change of Principal has also disrupted the smooth flow of the school and we believe this affected the Doomadgee school attendance. The beginning of Term 2 2015 saw Paula McGuire take the role of Doomadgee State School Principal. She is already working very closely with us and we have told her that we are here to support her in her position, to work together and aim for better results in the coming year. We are privileged to have the Remote School Attendance Strategy (RSAS) at the school, which employs several Student Attendance Officers to engage parents to increase school attendance. We see this as a vital part of our community and the work we do at the FRC.
We as a team are excited by the new management at the school and we want to use this to make a fresh start with those community members that have previously had bad experiences at the Doomadgee State School. This is our community and our school, and unless we as a community make changes, our children will suffer. We are very proud to be the face of change and we are looking forward to further engaging clients and seeing better results coming out of the Doomadgee State School. We know our community is strong and can achieve this.

Doomadgee Commissioners Eleanor Logan, Kaylene O’Keefe, Karen Jupiter, Isabel Toby, Guy Douglas, Elaine Cairns, David Gallagher and Christopher Logan