About
What is a Compassionate Community?
Compassionate Communities grow connectedness and compassion, working together, to create a supportive environment during life’s most testing times, especially those associated with life threatening or life limiting illness, chronic disability, being a carer, frailty, ageing, dementia, dying and grief.
This is everyone’s responsibility, that’s me, you, all individuals, families, peers, neighbourhoods, workplaces, schools, health services, government, faith based, voluntary and other organisations and services.
Professor Allan Kellehear is the founder of the Compassionate Communities approach to End of Life care. He talked to us about what this involves at our launch in 2018.
PURPOSE
Every person, every family and every community in the South West of Western Australia knows what to do when someone is caring, dying or grieving.
VISION
Our local communities are death literate, socially connected and can take practical actions to care for each other in illness, death and grief.
PURPOSE
Every person, every family and every community in the South West of Western Australia knows what to do when someone is caring, dying or grieving.
VISION
Our local communities are death literate, socially connected and can take practical actions to care for each other in illness, death and grief.
What we will do:
Foster social connection as people age.
Provide spaces and opportunities where it is acceptable for people to talk about illness, death and grief.
Create a culture where it is acceptable to ask for and offer help.
Make a person’s end-of-life wishes known so they can be supported in a way that is valid for them.
Support diversity, recognising old traditions and modern practices.
Take an assets/strengths based community development approach that involves acknowledging/activating what already exists and building upon it.
Support co-operation between formal services and the community, with community members being central to the process.
Place a person and their naturally occurring networks at the centre of care.
The South West Compassionate Communities Network acknowledges the Noongar community as the traditional owners and custodians of Country in the South West of Western Australia and acknowledges their continuing connection to land, water and community. We pay our respects to the people, the cultures and the elders past, present and emerging.
