Education/Training

Helen Rimington is the Director of drummond street’s  Family Wellbeing  Unit.  This unit delivers a range of community education, psycho-educational groups, and parenting support programs including:

  • Parenting & relationship groups and education seminars
  • Specific groups for women and men
  • Specific groups for complex issues such as mental illness or drug and alcohol and their impact on families,
  • Specific groups for children and young people
  • Parenting Support Program

For more information on our Family Wellbeing  Unit click here

drummond street’s Education & Training Unit

For 6 years drummond street’s  Education and Training Unit (ETU) offered a psychodynamic couples counselling course as part of a Master of Social Work through Melbourne University which was the first of it’s kind. We have now opted for a broader approach in response to:

1. The need for policy and service responses to strengthen families given that a strongly attached family is critical to health and wellbeing. Inversely, where family breakdown occurs and where conflict and bonds are weak, members are far more likely to present a range of health risk behaviours including mental and physical health issues, and exhibit behavioural outcomes such as drug and alcohol use, antisocial behaviour, early school drop-out and early teen pregnancy.

2. A growing evidence base and effective family intervention programs across a number of sectors and across the spectrum of interventions from prevention, early intervention, treatment and maintenance programs.

3. Utilising sector expertise along with university partners. The recent recruitment of a number of key program staff with specialist family intervention and broad collaborative curriculum development and delivery expertise. In addition, DSRC has developed and belongs to a number of networks of specialist family intervention agencies and education providers who have a commitment to seeing better professional development opportunities provided to the welfare workforce.

Currently, the Education and Training Unit offers a broad selection of professional development sessions to workers in the health/welfare and family relationship fields and delivers around 14 hours of this training per month.  With this broad focus DSRC will work with a range of partners including other service providers and academics to develop Family Intervention education for the sector.

Helen Rimington, the Director of Education and Training  has a Master of Education and a Graduate Diploma in Adolescent Health and Welfare and has completed a Family and Adolescent Mediation course with Family Mediation Centre. Helen has developed curriculum and taught at post graduate level at Melbourne University, developed and delivered hundreds of professional development sessions while working for The Royal Children’s Hospital, the Centre for Adolescent Health, beyondblue, and Jesuit Social Services. Helen co ordinated the Depression in the Workplace Program at beyondblue which entailed delivering workplace training in mental health to people from a wide variety of professions, and contnues to work as a sessional trainer for them. Helen can tailor a session or full day workshop to meet the needs of your organisation. Her style is interactive and humorous with a commitment to evidence based work and the latest information.

drummond street  can provide training for professionals based on most topics relating to community, health, relationships and families such as:

  • Running effective groups and seminars
  • Working cross culturally
  • The family as a setting for helath promotion
  • Using social marketing to build healthier family life
  • The principles of effective family literacy training
  • Working with high risk young people
  • Teaching people to build resiliency
  • Understanding anxiety
  • Assisting parents who have mental health isues
  • Helping clients look after their relationship
  • Teaching conflict resolution for couples
  • Exploring more effective ways to assist children with separation and divorce
  • Violence prevention
  • Preparing people  for parenthood
  • Running parenting interventions  for same sex couples
  • Queer affirmative practice for agencies
  • Healthy workplace culture
  • Teaching stress management techniques

and many more topics. Heln draws on a multidisciplinary team who have years of training experience. Stepfamilies Australia trainers are also part of the team and Daniela Zimmermann (Senior Training Manager) can deliver specialist Stepfamily training for practitioners, in addition to their popular couples courses. See our home page for a quick link to the National  Stepfamilies Australia website.

For more information on our professional development packages please give Helen a call on (03) 9663 6733

For access to the Groups & Seminars calendar, click here.

drummond street’s link with beyondblue.

Helen Rimington is a beyondblue accredited National Workplace Program trainer. The beyondblue National Workplace Program is designed to increase awareness and knowledge about the most common mental health problems in the workplace and provide staff and management with increased confidence to deal with any issues arising in the workplace. Information about the program is available at www.beyondblue.org.au and enquires for bookings are to be directed to workplace@beyondblue.org.au or contact beyondblue on 03 9810 6100.