EARLY DAYS
The Cottage centre began in 1981 in a small way with the priority of treating children who had been abused. Child abuse was only just beginning to be recognised as an important issue. The program started with a part time co-ordinator and women from the Church went out to collect children who had been referred by the Department of Community Services and brought them to the centre for play and a meal. It was called the “Children at Risk Programme”. We gradually expanded the program, fighting for government funds. A “Parent Program” was added to the Preschool. The old Methodist Parsonage was no longer suitable for the program which had at least been given a name – The Cottage Family Care Centre.
GROWTH.
In 1989 UnitingCare Burnside provided $450,000 to build a purpose built pre-school and West Epping Uniting Church provided our first two buses. The Cottage won many awards for its work, including the first “National Child Protection Award” in 1999.
The early Directors of the Cottage, including Dianne Wagg and Jacquie Leabeater did a great job building up the Centre. By now we were at the forefront of Child Protection and were supplying a unique service in NSW. The fact we were unique came back to bite us in 2014. We had speech therapists, occupational therapists, mothercraft nurses play therapists, preschool teachers, parent workers, with a staff of over 20. We had the Premiers wife as our Patron which I am sure helped us to win Premiers Award and COAG Award for Prevention of Violence. We were also awarded a “Community Service Award” by the NSW Government. We ran 2 National Child Protection Conferences at the University of Western Sydney which were attended by people from all over Australia.
It was a pity that more was not realised by these conferences but the staff were exhausted having to run them and keep the Preschool going. The job became more complex as staff increased, referrals from DOCS increased, and the range of services offered expanded. Finding the right staff was not easy and caused a good deal of grief when we chose the wrong person. Having said that most staff were very dedicated to job and stayed for a long period. We tried to run holiday programs to alleviate the stress on parents, and discovered that we asked too much of our staff and they needed holidays too.
BASIS FOR OUR WORK.
We based our work on the Kemp Foundation from Denver Colorado. They were the leading child protection agency in America at the time. They recognised the importance of “play” in child protection programs.
Church rules at the time meant that the majority of Board members had to be from the Uniting Church. For every professional we added to the Board we had to add a Church member. The Cottage Centre at its peak had a Board of 17 – far too many.
REASON FOR EXISTENCE
The real aim of the Cottage Centre was to break the cycle of child abuse, hold the family together and prepare children for school so that they would commence school on an equal footing with other children. We nurtured children from 6 months to six years in the program. We had a baby’s room with changing tables and cots and 3 classrooms with toilets attached to each. We had a laundry where we washed children’s clothing and a bathroom with a spa shaped bath where we washed we washed the children and hygiene improved. We supplied one good meal a day plus morning and afternoon tea. We gave parents two days away from their children to do other things. The 19 seater bus picked up and returned children in shifts from Macquarie Fields to Rosemeadow. We had 72 children in the program. We dreamed of having 5 Centres like the Cottage scattered around Sydney, unfortunately this was not to be.
THE FINAL STRAW
When the government announced we were more expensive than a “normal preschool” and they were transferring the funding to a different funding model we were devastated. The new model was aimed at strengthening families to avoid removal of their children. We carried out the program for 3 years before handing it over to Burnside in 2015. While we did extensive lobbying to try to prevent closure of the preschool, the government was the funding body. The fact that we were unique had come back to bite us. If we had been bigger we could have carried out research to prove the effectiveness of our program but we never had the money for this. At one stage Campbelltown had the highest incidence of Child abuse in the State but we were 8th on the list where children were removed from their parents. We believe the Cottage Centre made the difference in the figures. We estimated that we were involved with 20% of the abuse cases in Campbelltown at our peak. Over 31 years hundreds of abused and neglected children passed through the program.
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