Psy-Care Aotearoa

New care space guidance published, a name change, and we’re going to be a registered charity

KIA ORA KOUTOU,

There have been some awesome updates and changes happening behind the scenes in the last couple of months, including starting the transition to charitable trust status, and taking advantage of the switch-up to change our name! The Event Care Spaces guidelines we’ve been working on alongside a bunch of other harm reduction specialists have been published, and they are looking GREAT, if we say so ourselves. Our season is also off to a good start, with Ashlyn and Charlie leading a solid team at Oasis Festival a few weeks ago. Read on for more about all this and what else we’ve been up to 🙂

PSY-CARE AOTEAROA – NEW NAME, NEW STRUCTURE

We’ve been talking about shifting from incorporated society to charitable trust status for some time, as it’s a structure that better reflects how we actually operate, and so we can get you all those sweet sweet donation tax receipts. We finally got the ball rolling on this process, and thought we’d take the chance to make some other changes – Penny was the main driver of this, so I asked them to say a little about it: ———- Kia ora koutou! Since we’re transitioning from an incorporated society to a charitable trust, we thought it was a prime opportunity to change our name to ‘Psy-Care Aotearoa’. We felt this would be more reflective of our values around Tiriti partnership and allyship with tangata whenua (especially in our current political climate). The website will remain as psycare.nz, given that ‘.nz’ is the national top-level domain, and thus it’ll give us those tasty Aotearoa-specific Google search hits. Peace!

EVENT CARE SPACES

We’ve mentioned this mahi ticking along in the background in previous updates, and we’re so excited that it’s finally out there in the world. This website, www.eventcarespaces.nz,  is the result of a huge collaborative process by a working group of harm reduction experts and care space providers. It collates the years’ worth of experience and information in our collective minds into frameworks, guidelines and advice for anyone who is looking to set up a care space at an event. It also has information for promoters and organisers who are looking to work alongside a care space, explaining what that relationship can look like. We’re massively chuffed with the outcome of this mahi, although the core working group will continue adding to and improving the guidelines as time goes on. I want to give a special shout-out to Penny, who was part of the core group turning the contents of our minds into digestible guidelines, while still getting Psy-Care mahi done, and also travelling the world. Legend 🙂

DRINK SPIKING AND CARE TEAM COLLABORATION

Last summer we had a couple of reports of suspected drink spiking, which sent us on a winter deep dive into what support exists for folks who think this has happened to them, which in turn sparked a series of kōrero with the teams we work alongside most often about how to respond, and what we can do to minimise the likelihood of drink spiking occurring in the first place. Massive thanks to Mel and Rachael from SoundcheckAotearoa for providing a lot of the information and connecting of dots that mean we’ll be better prepared for this summer.

THE COMING SEASON

At this stage, we have full or nearly full teams locked in for all our planned events – big ups all the volunteers who are helping out! You’ll see us at Synchronicity, Twisted Frequency, Rolling Hertz, and Bullerfest. There might be more festivals in the mix yet to be announced, so if you want to volunteer with us but have missed out on a spot, keep an eye on your inbox 🙂

HARM REDUCTION TIP – MORE DRUGS DON’T EQUAL LESS DRUGS

This was Charlie’s summary from a kōrero the coordinators had a few weeks back, and it’s too good not to share. Maybe you’ve been in a situation where your having more of a time than you bargained for with your substances of choice, and a well-meaning friend suggests you smoke some weed to help calm you down? Spoiler alert, it won’t. More drugs don’t equal less drugs! In almost all situations, adding more substances will not make your experience easier, and will probably make it more intense. We don’t recommend it.

GIVEALITTLE – HOW IT’S GOING
Our Givealittle has been so successful, thank you so much to everyone who has contributed to it so far! We’ve already been able to buy two new (to us) canvas tents to replace the ones damaged last summer, as well as getting the ever-useful Mixing Guide of drug interactions printed onto some durable canvas – ideal for displaying outside our care space. Our kitchen tent especially was in a bad way – it has had holes in it since before I started with Psy-Care five seasons ago, but the Cobb Valley winds properly ruined it last summer, so this is a significant upgrade for us. Thank you!
The Givealittle is open for another couple of weeks, until the 22nd November, if you still want to contribute – we’ve still got a few items we want to add or upgrade for this season, the top of the list being some beautiful books and resources about te ao Māori, as well as covering our ongoing storage and web domain costs.

Left: No better way to check out a new tent then get the flatties to help set it up in the basement. Right: New Mixing Guides! So durable, so bright!

Thanks for reading, e hoa mā! We’ll have another update for you all in a few months, with some highlights of the summer season.

Ngā mihi,
Clare (and Penny, Ashlyn and Charlie)