Melbourne

Got some... News:

Apparently the program coordinator has in fact quit. Official as of last Friday. I guess all the "unplanned indefinite personal leave" was probably just her taking her accrued annual/sick leave.

Not too sure how to feel about it all. I blame her for large parts of what happened recently, but I don't actually know how much she had control over it, so I feel bad for blaming her. But emotions gonna emote, and I don't think repressing it is going to help. It also felt like she nailed and left me to deal with all the fallout, whether or not that's actually the case. So that doesn't help

I am worried about the future of lead tenant now, though. The old LT has shared a lot of stories about how the program used to be run, when it wasn't really being run at all. The people in lead tenant tend to not cause many issues, which means we also end up being an after thought for almost everything. We're also a small scale program, this organisation only has 2 lead tenant houses, at least in the west. So we have 1 dedicated case manager (although she only works 3 days a week), and a program leader (who works 9 days a fortnight). Everyone above them is split between lead tenant and Resi. And fairly often our resources get pulled over to resi houses when they're in crisis.

Apparently prior to this program leader coming on board, nobody was even considering lead tenant. People not suited to the program were being moved in constantly, leading to daily police visits, lots of drug use, and a ton of destruction. And before she came on board, there hadn't been a program manager in 2 or 3 years. So nobody was handling maintenance issues, nobody was on the ground dealing with the fallout, and nobody was trying to make sure the program actually worked.

I don't know if that will end up happening again, often times I'm very stubborn with things. I called the case management supervisor (who Tbf was acting program leader while the old one was on "indefinite unplanned personal leave") almost every day about the door, gate, camera, and lock issues, and I called the area manager (who works between LT/Kinship/resi) once a week. But people can only work 2 roles at once for the same pay and in the same hours for so long before they burn out. That's honestly probably what happened to the old program leader since she was also acting case manager for ~5/6 months. And I don't want to make that happen even sooner

But with nobody looking after and directly advocating for the program, I don't see how we can stay afloat, even half afloat. Somebody does need to be overseeing maintenance, safety, client matching, and everything else that needs to be done. And they either aren't trying hard enough to attract new applicants, or everybody's already heard how they treat their staff so nobody's applying. The case manager took 5 or 6 months to be replaced. The program manager might take just as long or maybe even longer

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