Category: Politics and society

Posted on

My photography on Wikipedia

Originally posted on hachyderm.io, posted here with minor edits.

I release a lot of my photos under the Creative Commons Attribution licence. It’s fun to see which of them have popped up on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, although it doesn’t line up with my favourites among my own photographs.

Wikipedia: Crown Sydney and a few variants in other languages make heavy use of photographs I took of the Crown Sydney construction site, or at least of its surroundings. (Most of them are cropped down to the construction site by the editors.)

Construction at Barangaroo Barangaroo towers Barangaroo construction at sunset

This photograph of the Eastern Suburbs viaduct is used in two articles related to it, Wikipedia: Eastern Suburbs & Illawarra Line and Wikipedia: Eastern Suburbs railway line:

Eastern suburbs rail line, from Sydney Tower

This, cropped and brightened by a Commons editor, is used on the Wikipedia: New South Wales Rural Fire Service article. Not discussed in the article: that truck is delivering Fire Santa, who visits kids at farm gates in the leadup to Christmas.

Fire Santa cometh!

The next two are I think the only two I have inserted myself, and appear in Wikipedia: Raging Waters Sydney. At the time I took them, the only Commons photographs of Raging Waters (then Wet ‘n’ Wild) were during construction, so I took a camera there to photograph the completed rides for Wikipedia. The first of the two also appears in Wikipedia: 2013 in amusement parks.

Tower 1, Wet'n'Wild Sydney: Bomborra and Tantrum Wet'n'Wild Sydney: H2Go Racers

This photograph is used on the Ukrainian language article about Bay Area Rapid Transit (Wikipedia: Метрополітен Затоки Сан-Франциско):

BART arriving

I extensively photographed the University of Sydney jacaranda a few years before it blew over, and this one appears on both the English and German articles about the tree (Wikipedia: Jacaranda, University of Sydney). It’s something of an exception to the “my faves don’t appear on Wikipedia” experience, I do like this series.

Jacaranda carpet, Sydney University

A cropped version of this photograph from a plane is used in both Wikipedia: Sierra Point (Brisbane) and Wikipedia: Dakin Building, neither of which I could have told you anything about when I saw them from a window seat in 2016.

Bay Area from above

Finally, it is honestly quite an honour to have this used in Wikipedia: Sydney Harbour Bridge, in both the English and Spanish articles:

Aboriginal and Australian flags above Sydney Harbour Bridge

Quite a few other photos of mine have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, although not used in articles. All of my Creative Commons licenced photography (around 4000 photographs) can be found via this Flickr search.

Posted on

Manager development vs exploiting would-be managers

This isn’t the most fruitful time in the tech industry to aspire to be a technical manager, with companies looking to increase the number of direct reports per manager and decrease the layers of management in their company. See for example:

Meta Platforms Inc. is asking many of its managers and directors to transition to individual contributor jobs or leave the company as it tries to become more efficient[…] The process is known internally as a “flattening”

Meta Asks Many Managers to Get Back to Making Things or Leave, Bloomberg, February 2023

However, the managers with newly larger teams, and even their managers, often don’t agree with upper management that their load is reasonable. And there are still pockets of growth within flat or shrinking companies and the management of those pockets still may not be allowed to add managers to accommodate it.

With lower formal demand for managers but continued informal demand for them comes increased opportunities to exploit would-be managers, or former managers, by making them “shadow managers”. Here’s how it looks:

  • the team has a line manager, known to the HR system as the manager of the team;
  • the team also has shadow managers: team members who are told they are “basically managers” or who step in to fill gaps they see; they might be aspiring to management, or they might be ex-managers who were moved out of formal management roles in a flattening process; and then were asked to continue most of their previous management tasks anyway;
  • the shadow managers take on a significant amount of management overhead in their work: they might be doing the bulk of coaching teammates, assessing their teammates’ performance, doing their teammates’ performance assessment paperwork, preparing their teammates’ promotion cases, giving their teammates feedback, and deciding if they have addressed it.

This can seem to everyone involved like a win-win. The line manager is overworked. The team needs help. And the shadow manager wants to be a manager, and this gives them a chance to try before they buy, and to get some skills while they do it.

But when shadow management goes on indefinitely, here’s how it works out badly for the shadow manager’s career:

  • Even with locally supportive management, this isn’t the shadow manager’s core job and so can easily end up being many hours on top of their daily workload rather than offsetting any of it.
  • Due to changes above or around them — a change in the line manager, or the hierarchy above finding out about and shutting down an undocumented shadow arrangement, or the team shrinking — the shadow management work isn’t needed any more. Due to the switch of focus, the shadow manager’s individual contributor skills are rusty and their recent contributions are low, and so their performance is suddenly at risk.
  • The shadow manager applies for a management job outside the company or even in another team, citing their shadow management experience. Since the never had formal direct reports, they are assessed as having zero experience in management and are incredibly unlikely to get the job.
  • If they do enter formal management, their management years of experience are counted only from when they began formally managing, their time spent shadow managing isn’t considered when they want to progress to senior management positions.

There’s certainly good reasons to give people interested in management exposure to it before they lock in a career change, but it shouldn’t be viewed as a favour to the potential manager to have them do the job indefinitely without documented responsibility. Quite the reverse.

The more ethical ways to develop future managers are:

Create junior managers rather than shadow managers. Give an inexperienced manager a small number of official direct reports and close supervision and coaching as a stepping stone to managing a full team. This starts the clock on their years of experience as a manager, and if your organisation gates manager tooling and training on having direct reports, this will give them access to those as well.

Shadow management should be linked to a position and time-boxed. If asking someone to manage without the lines of reporting, it should be linked to a written dated plan to change to managing those staff, with success criteria and an exit plan from the shadow management responsibilities if it’s not working out or if no position becomes available. Six months is reasonable; this gives sufficient exposure to the team’s planning and career cycles without knocking years of experience off their management career.

Time spent on leadership tasks should be planned for and rewarded. If an aspiring manager is mentoring, hosting interns, or assisting in reviewing or assessing their colleagues’ work, this should be recognised in their individual performance, and in their role description if it’s a regular task. Their individual contributor expectations should be reduced to allow for this workload. Their work should be documented in a way that at least assists internal job applications, even if it’s not likely to be recognised as management experience on the job market should they want to search for management jobs.

If required to flatten your organisation, actually do so. Don’t flatten it on paper but sneakily leave all your excess managers in place as shadow managers. Instead, transfer their manager-specific leadership tasks to a line manager, and invest in developing their individual contributor career or finding them transfer opportunities as a line manager to a team that needs them.

Posted on

When your mindset isn’t the problem: getting adaptive training when you need technical training

When you hit a certain stage of your corporate career — like being a woman of a certain age, but better paid — you may end up in a lot of development training for various reasons, or pointed at coaching, or both. I learned, in one of these, a very useful distinction, what people development curriculum designers call adaptive challenges vs technical challenges.

Technical challenges are skills gaps, basically. You don’t know Australian tax law. You don’t know C++. You’re not a very polished public speaker. You aren’t well networked enough with senior leaders.

Adaptive challenges are when you’re getting in your own way. You learned C++ but you can’t bring yourself to apply for the job. You’ve practiced your public speaking but you turn down opportunities to do it. You know lots of people and they think highly of you, but you never ask them for help.

It’s possible to have both challenges at the same time, and for difficulties in one to inhibit the other; say, your dislike of attention (adaptive) is getting in the way of you investing in your public speaking skills (technical). But there’s also a huge tendency in corporate people development to spend a lot of time on adaptive challenges, particularly for underrepresented groups and in equity programs, relative to the investment in technical challenges.

My belief about why this is is that addressing adaptive challenges simply scales better. Whether someone is in finance or activism or programming or real estate or medicine, the techniques you teach them to get them OK with asking other people for help more, or asserting their opinions more, or for assessing their own work fairly, are similar. You don’t need to find someone with an overlapping professional background or from the same field to address adaptive challenges, and you can draw on an entire community of teaching and coaching practice. And on the provider side, you can position yourself as a coach who teaches assertiveness in a wide variety of fields, rather than someone who trains assertiveness for non-profit accountants!

It may also be a comforting story to tell yourself about your equity practices: probably the reason that underrepresented people aren’t succeeding in our organisation is that they’ve internalised messages from somewhere else, probably some large and uncontrollable force outside, that they aren’t worthy! Fortunately, they are now on a level playing field in your organisation and all you need to do is help them out of the mindset that other forces taught them.

Whatever the cause though, the result is a similar pattern to vague feedback holding women back. If what is stopping someone progressing in their career is that they don’t know enough about Australian tax law, at some point they just need to learn more about Australian tax law, and assertiveness training doesn’t have a lot to add. And they or their employer are going to have to do something not as scalable as assertiveness training to address it.

For employers: don’t leap to adaptive challenges as the answer for your equity problems. If there’s technical challenges, you are going to have to drill in to individual or small group teaching, or invest in external programs that require considerable time and money investment. (Their adaptive coach might encourage them to take an hour every week to reflect on their goals, but their taxation law professor is going to flat-out require that they pass exams.)

Managers: track investment in someone’s development over time: if an employee did Overcoming Impostor Syndome and Unlocking the Big You last year, you should question whether The Light Within is the course for this year, relative to the entrance requirements for a masters degree or a rotation into a team that writes more C++. Work with people to ensure that there’s investment in the actual skills they need to progress as well as into their mindset. In the worst case, you are really selling someone very short if you help them be big and bold and proud and self-actuating, and then you don’t listen to them now that they know enough about themselves to know that they really need to learn more C++.

Posted on

2023 charitable giving: homelessness, justice, self-determination, climate

I like to share my giving in order to give folks who don’t know where to give, or who might be inspired to do their own research and start giving, even if not to the same organisations.

I have three of tiers of 2023 recurring giving. The largest level is organisations I have a longer history of giving to and more insight into their strategy. The next level is newer causes I am interested in or exploring. The final one is a “hat tip” level of donations supporting not-for-profit technology organisations whose technology I use a lot.

Larger donations

The Haymarket Foundation is a secular organisation focussed on people experiencing homelessness and disadvantage in Sydney. They specialise in complex homelessness (eg, people with mental health, drug use, or trauma), and we particularly value that they are trans-inclusive. My family has supported them in the past (eg at the start of the pandemic, and as their winter 2022 matching donors).

The National Justice Project, working for systemic change for asylum seekers and refugees, Indigenous people, and detainees, often through strategic legal action. They have advocated for offshore refugee detainees medical case (eg DCQ18’s pregnancy termination, child DWD18’s care for self-harm) and for an inquest into police inaction preceeding the murder of Indigenous baby Charlie Mullaley (if anyone has read Jess Hill’s See What You Made Me Do, Charlie’s terrible death is one of the central stories you may remember).

GiveDirectly Refugees which gives unconditional cash transfers to long-term refugees in Uganda. Unconditional cash transfers give people in poverty the power to decide what they need to spend money on in order to address their own situation. Australian donors can donate via Effective Altruism Australia to receive a tax deduction.

Note: I am not an uncritical supporter of Effective Altruism, see eg How effective altruism let Sam Bankman-Fried happen, Against longtermism, Effective altruism and disability rights are incompatible. I do specifically like the case for unconditional cash transfers.

Smaller donations

Aboriginal Legal Service NSW/ACT: Aboriginal-led justice advocacy and legal representation.

Original Power, building self-determination in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, via a Giving Green recommendation.

Farmers for Climate Action, influencing Australia to adopt strong economy-wide climate policies with opportunity for farmers and farming communities, via a Giving Green recommendation.

Purple House / Western Desert Nganampa Walytja Palyantjaku Tjutaku Aboriginal Corporation. Late stage kidney disease is endemic in remote Australia. Purple House runs 18 remote dialysis clinics enabling people to get back to their country and family. It also offers respite and support while dialysing in Alice Springs or Darwin.

Hat-tip donations

Internet Security Research Group, who fund Let’s Encrypt. Let’s Encrypt’s free HTTPS certificates are securing the very page you are viewing right now.

Signal Foundation, who fund Signal messaging, I use Signal for secure communication with many friends and communities.

Previously

You may also be interested in the organisations my family supported at the start of the pandemic.

Posted on

Questions to ask of employers transitioning to supporting permanent telecommuting

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Remote work

Some employers are beginning to announce transitions to remote-friendly or all-remote workforces even after office work is judged safe again. This has a lot of potential upsides in reducing commutes, in increasing job opportunities outside of established tech centres, in giving people access to their preferred working styles.

But there’s also a lot of potential downsides where employees personally pay to recreate the parts of the office experience they need and nevertheless find that their career tops out early or that they’re summoned or semi-summoned back to a tech centre just as they’ve started to realise the benefits of remote work.

Thus, just as I’ve written before about questions you should ask when hired into an existing remote position, you should ask a similar set for a company or position transitioning to remote work, to make sure that it is invested for the long term and is clear about any career or financial sacrifices you will be required to make to be remote.

Are there limits on where employees can be located? It’s quite common for remote employees to be required to be based in certain timezones, countries, or states/provinces where the employer already has some kind of established presence.

Is this transition in fact permanent, or is there a review date? Moving away from a city is a very large investment, often in direct costs but definitely in opportunity costs. Best to make such a decision on a strong commitment from an employer to a long time frame.

Will compensation be adjusted downwards for employers who relocate to an area with lower cost of living (or lower market salaries)? There are some remote-first or remote-friendly employers who pay the same salary no matter where employees are located, but also many which pay against local cost of living or local market conditions.

Will all remote compensation be adjusted downwards on the assumption that everyone will leave high cost of living areas? Hopefully not! Because some people have substantial investments in their current area of residence, eg commitments to their partner’s career or to their local family or friends, or to the cultural scene or their hobbies, or to retaining the option to leave their current employer for another that will require them to be office-based.

Will employees who move to an area with less generous minimum benefits have their benefits cut? Eg, will they lose days of vacation or carer’s leave? Will their insurance be revised in line with their new residence’s minumums?

Will there be formal limits on which positions are available remotely?

Even in the software, creative, and research positions that can be done remotely, it’s common for companies to not allow all positions to be remote. Here’s some possibilities for what this might look like:

  • you can’t become an executive if you’re remote
  • you can’t become a people manager at all if you’re remote
  • you can’t do security-sensitive or personnel-sensitive work if you’re remote
  • you can’t achieve a certain job level if you’re remote

Best to know!

If the company is indeed open to all positions being remote, how are they going to ensure equality of opportunity?

If there are going to still be offices, it may in theory be possible to become an executive or a high level staff member while remote… but it eventually emerges that no one is actually doing those jobs remotely, that those folks are all office-based.

What does the employers plan for developing remote staff careers look like and how will they audit its success?

Will there be training and resources for workers transitioning to remote, for managers who are remote or managing remote workers, etc?

There are specific skills required to manage and be part of both all-remote teams and mixed-remote-office teams. Will these be taught to employees? Will there be trained support for specific situations that may arise (eg, it may be more difficult to reach remote employees in a suspected emergency)?

Will there be financial support for the costs of remote working?

Remote working passes the office maintenance costs onto employees, eg substantial extra energy costs (particularly in areas with very cold winters or very hot summers), additional space, need for office furnishings, higher Internet bills and larger mobile plans, IT equipment, etc. Will the employer reimburse these costs and to what extent?

Ideally this support isn’t too specific. Eg, “we’ll pay for a co-working space”: co-working spaces usually have open office plans and quite a few involve hotdesking (especially if you’re part-time). They’re thus generally not suitable for people who have a lot of sensitive meetings (ie most managers or HR staff), some people who need physical accommodations, or people who are unable to work well in open plan offices.

Conversely, “we’ll pay to fit out your home office”: establishing a home office requires that people have or can afford to move to a place with an extra room, and usually that there are only one or at most two people in the home who need a home office.

Flexibility is better.

Will business travel be mandatory or strongly encouraged?

Quite a lot of remote teams rely on an mandatory or near-mandatory all-hands in-person get together once or twice a year for team building purposes. This may be an easy trade for some to get the benefits of remote work, but it may not be for others, especially for primary carers.

This question may be especially relevant for people who are going to be one of the few remotes on their team and may be expected to travel to the office regularly; and also for managers, who are occasionally expected to travel out to each of their remote reports periodically.

Will there be allowed to be children/dependants in the house during working hours and are there restrictions on their care arrangements? At least when schools and daycares are open, it’s common for employers to insist that if there are children/dependants living with a remote worker, they must have a carer who isn’t the worker. It’s possible (jurisdiction dependent) for them to insist that the house must not have dependants present in work hours at all.

Creative Commons License
Questions to ask of employers transitioning to supporting permanent telecommuting by Mary Gardiner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Posted on

5×2: more news from the organisations

This entry is part 8 of 8 in the series 5×2

I spoke to several more 5×2 organisations about what they’re working on (several of them, by waiting to call me, had the advantage of discovering the blog series):

UNICEF (day 4) is working to make sure that children receive other vaccines: measles vaccination campaigns have been (hopefully) temporarily interrupted and without good tracking and catch-up campaigns, they risk cohorts of children who go unvaccinated for other diseases.

The Haymarket Foundation (day 2) have worked to move many people who were sleeping rough in Sydney into hotels. They’ve also secured PPE so that they can visit these folks rather than have them staying all alone in hotel rooms indefinitely and have been able to distribute some to other agencies too. They’re working on supplying devices too so that people can access telehealth services. They’re not accustomed to donor outreach or publicity and are working on a way to connect with donors without compromising the privacy and safety of their community.

Asylum Seeker Resource Centre and ACON (both day 5) are both working to transition a very in-person based and community-centred service model to a one-on-one, low contact model, while working with community members who have previous traumatic experiences of confinement (asylum seekers) and pandemics (LGBTQ people).

The ASRC writes:

People seeking asylum are often denied the right to work and simultaneously denied the right to safety nets such as Centrelink and Medicare. Right now this means that thousands of people seeking asylum in Australia are being left stranded and forgotten by cruel Government policies. It is clear that people seeking asylum will be among the hardest hit by the impacts of COVID-19.

We are still open and this is why

ACON has a clearinghouse of resources for LGBTQ people during COVID and is providing information on drug and alcohol use in this context at their Pivot Point site.

If you have the capacity to support your community by finding frontline organisations working with Indigenous people, ethnic minorities, LGBTQ people, homeless people, people without food, disabled people, chronically ill people, children, elderly people, and other vulnerable and at-risk groups, please support them today.

Posted on

Things you’re allowed to be sad about, an incomplete list

  • getting seriously ill, or having someone close to you become seriously ill or die
  • not being able to see them while they’re ill or before they die
  • choosing between two of your patients’ lives because you only have one ventilator
  • being unable to hold or attend a funeral for a loved one
  • needing urgent medical attention at a time when it’s less available or when you risk catching COVID-19 while receiving it
  • being trapped in a house with your abuser
  • losing your job in the middle of an enormous economic crash
  • losing your home or your possessions likewise
  • shutting down your business you sunk all your savings and time and dreams into
  • having all your savings evaporate
  • living in another country from your loved ones in a time of closed borders
  • planning labour, delivery, and early parenting without the guarenteed access to pain relief, Caesearean sections, midwives, or home support you’d been relying on
  • not being able to care for close friends or relatives in need of help
  • cancelling or postponing your wedding
  • getting uncomfortably ill, particularly if you don’t have good access to sick leave and medical care
  • living alone and dealing with the prospect of not seeing anyone face to face for weeks and weeks
  • not being able to see close friends or relatives for an indefinite period
  • needing to look after your children while holding down a full time job
  • needing to lay other people off and knowing that they face long-term poverty
  • listening to a bunch of people you trusted opine about how “only” sick people (like you) or elderly people (like you) are at serious risk
  • watching news reports about people who were happy and prosperous weeks ago dying alone in hospital corridors
  • being cooped up in your teeny, dark, noisy house for months
  • not being able to fix up problems with your house because handypeople aren’t essential services
  • cancelling your holidays, and telling your kids you cancelled your holidays
  • explaining to your kids that the new normal is that most days there will be bad news about schools, jobs, friends, holidays and you don’t know when the news will stop getting worse
  • cancelling your birthday party or regular board games night
  • liking Milan, or Rome, or New York, and not being sure whether or when you’ll be able to visit them again or what you’ll find if you do
  • liking cruising, and not being sure it is a thing that will exist in the world after this year
  • not being able to hook up with strangers
  • not being able to go to the beach during some of the best weather you’ve seen lately
  • being subjected to people on social media wanting to take whips to “juveniles” seen outside their houses, or wondering why you even bothered to have children if you aren’t thrilled to be locked in a house with them for a few months at a time at short notice

Yes, not all these things are created equal, the list is loosely ordered and of course you don’t want to complain about taking time off from surfing to someone who just missed their mother’s funeral.

But, at the same time, they’re all sad. You have the right to acknowledge if only to yourself and hopefully to fellow less affected friends that it sucks that your holiday is canceled and that you liked your regular board game night a whole lot actually.

This is important for two reasons, one is simply for peace of mind, insofar as such a thing exists right now. A whole lot has changed in the world in the last four weeks. You’re struggling to keep up and you’re grieving. It benefits no one, especially you, for you to pretend to yourself you’re suddenly all cool with anything short of imminent death.

The other reason is that eventually we want it all back. We want to be mostly free of the looming threat of infectious disease, and for hospitals to be safe, and to be allowed to leave our houses whenever we damn well please, and to have jobs (even if we have children!), and to be able to retire, and to see our friends, and to have new sex partners, and for people on social media to stop hating children so much.

Being deprived of all this is a really serious imposition on civil liberties and while we’re certainly called upon to go along with it for the sake of our communities, and it’s useless to be angry or sad about it non-stop or to heap stress on politicians and public health officials in difficult times, it’s also not a good idea to convince ourselves that we like it this way.

We don’t like it this way, and we’re not supposed to. It’s really really really sad.

Posted on

5×2: Asylum Seeker Resource Centre and ACON

This entry is part 7 of 8 in the series 5×2

Today is our final day of 5 days of donations to support charities working with vulnerable communities during a health and economic crisis.

Our second last charity is the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre which provides a foodbank, legal aid, healthcare, and other services to refugees and people seeking asylum in Victoria. Their COVID-19 statement.

Many refugees and people seeking asylum are affected by poverty and lack of access to government resources (eg, some of ASRC’s community don’t have access to publicly funded healthcare). In addition, refugees and people seeking asylum often have experience of being detained (frequently by the Australian government) or having limited freedom of movement, and sometimes of infectious diseases spreading through their communities due to lack of healthcare or crowding or neglect. Social distancing, self-isolation, quarantine, widespread illness, etc, are things many are familiar with, often deliberately and cruelly inflicted, and this time is re-traumatising for them.

Founded 18 years ago, the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC) is Australia’s largest human rights organisation providing support to people seeking asylum.

We are an independent not-for-profit organisation whose programs support and empower people seeking asylum to maximise their own physical, mental and social well being.

We champion the rights of people seeking asylum and mobilise a community of compassion to create lasting social and policy change.

Take a tour of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre | ASRC

You can donate to the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre online.

Our last charity is ACON, an Australian health organisation for LGBTQ people, founded for and focussing on people with HIV.

There have been other terrible global pandemics in our lifetime: 32 million people are thought to have died of AIDS to date, with hopes that only 500,000 people will die in 2020. That’s right, half a million deaths from AIDS in 2020 is the hoped for outcome.

And of course, since it’s an immunodeficiency disease, people with HIV are at higher risk from COVID-19, so the two collide. Here’s ACON’s COVID-19 statement, the impact of COVID-19 on people living with HIV in Australia does not yet seem well understood.

We are a fiercely proud community organisation. For our entire history, the work of ACON has been designed by and for our communities.

Established in 1985, our early years were defined by community coming together to respond to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in NSW, and we remain committed to ending HIV for everyone in our communities. We do this by delivering campaigns and programs to eliminate new HIV transmissions. Supporting people living with HIV to live healthy and connected lives remains core to our work.

As we have grown, we have been proud to work with a diverse range of people to ensure their voice and health needs are represented in the work we do.

Who We Are — ACON

You can donate to ACON online.

I’ve shared my family’s donations this week in order to inspire you to think about the hardest hit people in your communities, and in the world, as COVID-19’s health and economic implications bite. If you’re inspired to support one of these ten organisations they can all use a great deal of additional help, but I also encourage you to look around your own community, and around the world for organisations at the frontline of providing services to vulnerable people, and to support them.

Posted on

5×2: news from the organisations

This entry is part 6 of 8 in the series 5×2

Several 5×2 organisations have been in touch to share their stories about what they and their communities are going through at this time:

We talked with folks from Médecins Sans Frontières Australia (MSF) (day 1) and YoungCare (day 3) on the phone yesterday. Both organisations are very very scared for their communities. MSF is in Italy and Greece right now assisting with COVID-19 care, and particularly advocating for the evacuation of refugee camps on the Greek Islands. They are having a lot of trouble moving their staff between countries to where they are needed. YoungCare is naturally deeply concerned for disabled Australians with high needs in coming weeks.

Waltja Tjutangku Palyapayi Aboriginal Corporation (day 3) wrote:

Everyone here is worried about the impact on our vulnerable clients, many who have multiple health problems and are living in overcrowded inadequate housing or are homeless. Today we are arranging transport back home to Communities for some of our elderly and disabled clients and board members. There is a lot of fear so we are also doing as much as we can to source and create information in local languages, as well as personally keep key senior people up to date.

FoodCare Orange (day 2) wrote:

… such an unsure and concerning time for our community… As FoodCare receives no recurrent Government funding, this will certainly assist us to continue providing what we believe is a very needed service to those experiencing financial hardship.