Blue Knot Foundation is a national for purpose organisation. It empowers recovery and builds resilience for adults with the lived and living experience of complex trauma. Complex trauma is repeated ongoing and often extreme experiences of violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation, and their impacts. These experiences can occur in childhood, as a young person, as an adult or across the lifespan. People affected often experience a lot distress at different times in their life. Many adopt coping strategies such as alcohol, drugs, over/undereating, self-harm and suicidality to lessen their distress; many have been lost to suicide.
Survivors often struggle with their sense of self, relationships, mental and physical health and wellbeing, and impacts on their education and work life. Many people with complex trauma carry a range of mental health diagnoses without their underlying trauma being identified. Blue Knot works highlights the importance of acknowledging and addressing people’s trauma as a critical path to hope and possibilities for healing and recovery.
Blue Knot, established as ASCA in 1995 has long advocated for greater recognition of the lived and living experience of diverse interpersonal traumas. And alongside this, the need for greater understanding and acceptance of their psychosocial impacts. Education is critical to building a trauma-informed community in which safety, trust, dignity, choice and empowerment are bottom line. Blue Knot has been one of the pioneers in trauma-informed service delivery in Australia producing many seminal guidelines around trauma-informed practice and complex trauma recovery. These publications are informed by diverse forms of knowledge including lived and living experience, practice and current research.
Blue Knot services are informed by this evidence. This includes Telehealth services for adult survivors of childhood trauma, people engaging with the National Redress Scheme, inmates in Correctional Centres and people with disability with complex trauma experiences. These Telehealth services provide accessible trauma-informed culturally safe counselling, information and referrals to survivors, their supporters and professionals. In the last financial year, we provided close to 50,000 Occasions of Service across our Telehealth services.
Blue Knot also delivers professional development training, supervision and supports organisational development nationally. In the last financial year we delivered over 500 training sessions in different modes to close to 13,000 participants and over 750 supervision sessions. Our training programs focus on trauma responsive practice, building safe organisations, secure base leaders, and promoting staff wellbeing. For our 5 main training programs an average of 96% of participants indicated that they would be interested in attending other Blue Knot training and over 98% of attendees stated that the training was relevant to their work.
Every year on the last Thursday in October we hold Blue Knot Day, our annual awareness day highlighting the prevalence and impacts of complex trauma, and message of hope and healing. To find out more and to access our suite of evidence-informed resources or explore our training go to www.blueknot.org.au There is hope and help. Recovery is possible with the right support.
