Sanctuary Aus - Main Office

Sanctuary Aus offers access to a range of therapeutic professionals to ensure each family’s needs are met in a holistic and targeted manner. Our goal is to support Canberra’s most vulnerable children, families and community members who are facing such difficulties as poverty, sickness, trauma and disability and who struggle to care for themselves or their children. Sanctuary Aus places great emphasis on the need for society to return to a far more community-based focus, with ‘community’ coming together to support each other, to support families and to care for the children in the community together.

Sanctuary Aus works to address the many issues which can impact on a family’s capacity to raise their children in a healthy and caring environment, maximising the child’s capacity to develop and flourish in their home environment.

Sanctuary provides services through individual/family work, group work and NDIS therapeutic work. Our priority work includes:

1. Individual and Family work:

• • In the family’s home;
  • Specialising in therapeutic services for children and families who have been affected by trauma, particularly during their developmental years;
  • Working with the whole family to develop effective relationships;
  • Supporting parents to provide the optimum environment for their children’s health and wellbeing;
  • Provision of an emergency accommodation and support service for parents and children escaping domestic violence;

2. Group programs for:

• • Women seeking to improving their self-esteem;
  • Parents to participate in the Circles of Security® program to increase their parenting skill and further develop their attachment with their children;
  • Children to improve their self-esteem and emotional literacy;
  • Children dealing with grief and loss;

3. NDIS supports, specialising in working with children and families, in the following NDIS categories:

• • Skills development;
  • Developing Behaviour Management plans, with corresponding training;
  • Social skills development;
  • Training;
  • Capacity Building support in early childhood.

Sanctuary Aus supports children and families to become the best they can be and develop caring and positive relationships between family members. 

Sanctuary Aus plan to utilise willing volunteers including previous clients and external volunteers to provide a safe and therapeutic ‘community’ around our clients, reducing their isolation and increasing their networks of support.

Sanctuary Aus programs provide holistic services, working from a strength-based perspective to support parents to recognise, recover and build on their existing strengths in raising their children. Sanctuary staff have a wide range of specialist skills and qualifications and use creative and cognitive therapies, developmental trauma services, assessment, skills training and group work. Sanctuary Aus also aims to provide a limited number of crisis accommodation service to parents and families escaping domestic violence, as such services are a high need in the Canberra community and an essential component of keeping our children and families safe.