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Thrive Services is a family support service that covers the Katoomba and Lithgow local government areas. We’ve been around in various iterations for about 45 years providing family support, which includes Bill Relief, Food relief and counselling for families, and we also provide homelessness support for families with children. We also have family counselling and family mentoring, and parenting groups. We run family fun days, and we provide children’s activities and school holidays. The floods were caused by a rain event, and that rain event was massive. Up here, lots of houses were inundated with water and we were one of them.
Our basement was flooded waist-high, and our basement is where we store a lot of our surplus equipment for emergency response. So blankets, coats. We also stored our Christmas presents down there for our Christmas event, and all of it was ruined by the water. It took a good six weeks for us to get the stuff cleaned out. I think the importance of our service during that time and any crisis really, as Bush flies or the pandemic, is the fact that we’re open, we’re here, and they can come in, and they can sit down in a dry space.
If they’re homeless, particularly, they can get a cup of tea and a chat, and they’ve really just had someone sit and listen to them. We will need to get donations of supplies for personal hygiene use. They were all ruined by the water and donated toys for Christmas. Have a website where you can make donations of cash, which help us because it means we can buy the family’s need. And we also have donation bins at the shopping centres in Katoomba and Lithgow where people can deposit Christmas food and Christmas toys.
And so we just ask that people buy new things and not donate second-hand things because it’s nice for a child to get something new for Christmas. We are grassroots embedded in our community, and we are the ones that the Community trusts, so continuing to support them. A small organisation means that families and communities get help right where they are when they need it.