Organisational Services

The Organisational Services team had a big year in 2023-2024. Our team expanded from 2 people to 4 people, as we hired 2 project leads to help support the continuous improvement and development of our workforce & organizational processes.

We had our first full year of living in our new office space, which has been instrumental in supporting the activities of HRVic’s programs, our partners and most importantly, our community. We made significant progress on our internal policy & procedure updates, which will contribute significantly towards our accreditation achievement this year. And as always, the OS team continued to support the entire organisation in the areas of human resources, IT solutions, organisational & program budgets, office enquiries, maintaining relationships and developing new & improved systems across all of these areas.

As part of our strategic plan, HRVic is committed to "nurturing our partnerships through the cocreation of a community space" and event schedule with our communities and sector.

To facilitate this, one of our goals in moving to this new building was to be able to host events and offer our space to other organisations.

Snowy Primmer, our Organisational Services Support Officer, took over managing all aspects of our building and led the bookings process for both HRVic & external org hosted events

Some of these included:

Harm Reduction Victoria program and project meetings, training sessions and events such as:

-          DanceWize team, fortnightly volunteer meetings & End of Year Event

-          Fuse Initiatives team, monthly Fuse Networks meetings & End of Year Event

-          PAMS and Policy: ODTP Reform monthly meetings

-          Health Promotion Team workshops & trainings

-          HPT Awareness Day events

-          HRVic Events Committee's Community Events

Other organisational recurring use:

-          Vixen Collective, weekly shared office space & events

-          Family Drug Support (FDS), weekly shared office space, Stepping Stones course

-          Australian Psychedelic Society (APS), fortnightly meetings

-          St Vincent’s Nurses for C No More Project, weekly shared office space

-          Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP), shared office space

Other Meetings and Conferences:

-          Australian Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Practitioners (AMAPP) &

Australian Psychedelic Society (APS) Conference

-          Entheogenesis Australia (EGA), webcast recording

-          AIVL organisational use

-          Department of Health meetings

With a new premises and new building co-tenants come new responsibilities.

We established a new OHS committee, made up of representatives from HRVic and Vixen Collective, to ensure our building and staff members meet all safety regulatory requirements. This group meets quarterly to review any incidents that have occurred and to talk about areas of development.

The OHS representatives attended a refresher course, and we established new Fire Wardens from each organisation who undertook specific Fire Safety training and accreditation.

With our new ‘Odditorium’ comes the responsibility of not letting it go to waste, so an ‘Events Committee’ was established. This dedicated group will manage and execute events hosted by HRVic as a whole and support the Organisational Support Officer in their role managing the space as well as supporting and helping to coordinate program specific events where requested.

March ‘24: HRVic hosts online Drug Checking Forum with special guests Jason George (NZNEP) and Steph Tzanetis (CanTEST) who both work in those fields (legally) in their respective country/state and described their drug checking models and others theyve worked with or seen in action.

May ‘24: “Check, Please!” was developed and run as a community dinner and opportunity for community consultation around drug checking.

Community was invited to share a feed and talk about the drug checking: ot’s developments, possibilities and future.

The Events Committee also started planning events for the next (financial) year, including regular Community Dinners and an International Drug Users Day event.

These events are primarily for HRVic & our community; to get together, have a feed and update them on our activities. The committee’s role is largely operational, but we’ve been working hard to ensure each event is aligned with HRVic’s vision, mission, and objectives. We hope to see you at the next one!

Ongoing Professional Development

To enhance our team’s development, we completed several trainings as an organisation:

As our staff are essentially first responders within their communities we make sure to offer  First Aid, naloxone administration and overdose (substance poisoning) recognition and response and mental health first aid training.

This year we also did the 'Acknowledge This' training, and attended a Cultural Walk with Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Cultural Heritage Aboriginal Corporation on country

As part of making our building more accessible, our Org Support Officer, Snowy Primmer secured a building improvement grant through Merri-bek Council and we will be installing an automatic door at our front entrance in the coming year. We thank Merri-bek Council for their support in making this happen and look forward to working with their team more.

Big Thanks To Our Support

A huge thank you to both ASRC Cleaning and Wyndham Professional Cleaning services for keeping our building in such good order throughout the year; to Jess Tailby Habitat Gardens for caring for all our plants; to Devise Building for completing a massive acoustic improvement project; and to Fire Equipment Services continues to keep our building safe for use.

We’d also like to thank Shova and Shane of Dixon and Doshi Accounting for their unrelenting financial services. And the team at Zynet for supporting all our IT endeavors year after year.

Data Projects

Damien McCarthy also joined the Organisational Support Services team as HRVic’s Data Project Lead. His work centered around identifying and developing HRVic’s overall data architecture, collaborate with internal and external stakeholders to provide database changes and recommendations and continue to make improvements in the PAMS database.

The biggest project that was completed this year was recommending a new customer relationship tool that HRVic could use across the organisation to improve our communication both internally and externally.

As evidenced in most of the work that HRVic does, we collaborated with other organisations of similar values, comparable size, data sensitivity issues, and member/volunteer bases. A big thank you to the organisations we consulted with on this project:

·       CAHMA

·       First Step

·       Scarlet Alliance

·       VAADA

·       Living Positive Victoria

·       NUAA

·       QuIVAA

After researching and evaluating the findings from this scoping project, we were able to recommend ChilliDB to our Board and are excited to move towards implementing this over the next several months. Watch this space over the next year as we will be focusing on improving our communication with all of you!