How a Lotterywest grant is helping Lifeline WA support the Wheatbelt region

Content warning – the following article discusses suicide.

Lotterywest has been helping the people of Western Australia for over 90 years, providing hundreds of grants across our State, to the tune of $351.5 million in the last financial year alone.

We’ve been diving into a number of these grants through our Dream State series, and this week we’re looking at Lifeline WA.

For those not familiar, Lifeline WA is a vital service that provides a wide range of crisis support, suicide prevention and counselling services and programs.

One recent way Lotterywest has supported Lifeline WA has been via a $487,000 grant towards an online suicide prevention support project in the Wheatbelt called Eclipse.

Eclipse Online seeks to fill an important gap in some of WA’s most remote areas, providing support for individual survivors of suicide “initial postvention support and provide a service for those who attempted suicide in the past and are still struggling with suicidal behaviours.”

The aim of the project is to increase coping skills and share strategies for survival, providing an opportunity for participants to:

• Experience a safe and supportive environment to explore suicide attempting with others who have lived experience;
• Reduce internalised/perceived stigma about their suicide attempt(s);
• Increase comfort and ability to speak about their thoughts and feelings which led to the suicide attempt(s);
• Discuss the challenges and successes they face following their suicide attempt.

More recently, Lotterywest grants also funded $600,000 towards project costs for measuring the safety of volunteers working remotely via the Volunteer@Home program.

This program trains regional volunteers remotely to answer calls to Lifeline’s 13 11 14 support line, and the project will build further on these measures to “explore the impact of crisis support volunteers working from home and improve the care, safety and wellbeing support for volunteers.”

In case you were wondering just how vital these services were, suicide is the leading cause of death for Australians aged 15-49 years, and people in rural populations are twice as likely to take their life by suicide compared to metropolitan people.

Find out more about Lifeline WA here or connect directly with them via:

• Phone line: 13 11 14
• Text line: 0477 13 11 14
• Chat online: lifeline.org.au/crisis-chat

And for more about how playing lotto is helping make good things happen in the WA community, head to the Lotterywest Dream State Hub.

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This article is sponsored by Lotterywest and endorsed by us. Please see our Editorial Policy for more info.