Dear Friends
We greatly appreciate your ongoing generosity towards Centacare Catholic Family Services which helps us to offer much needed assistance to families, individuals and communities. As we celebrate our 75th anniversary, we renew our commitment to offer support and hope to vulnerable families and individuals.

Please refer to the envelope linked below to read about our broad range of services. To be able to sustain these services in times when our clients’ needs continue to grow, we rely upon parishes and donors like you to continue your financial and prayerful support.  If you are able to assist us again, please complete and return your donation using the attached postage paid envelope.

Alternatively, you may wish to place the envelope in Centacare’s Church Appeal collection which will be conducted in most parishes on the weekend of 31 July – 1 August. Centacare is also able to receive credit card donations online at www.centacaremelbourne.org or by phone on 9287 5555.

Centacare’s mission is to build on the Gospel vision of “life to the full” for families, individuals and communities in all their diversity. Friends, with your support, Centacare can continue to give concrete expression to the Church’s mission to serve those who are suffering or in need. Thank you for your ongoing support and contribution to our shared mission.

With every best wish

Fr Joe Caddy
Chief Executive Officer

Click here to download brochure/donation envelope.

A gift of family resilience

We greatly appreciate the generous support you have shown Centacare Catholic Family Services in the past.

This year, we are celebrating Centacare’s 75th anniversary and looking forward to the canonisation of Blessed Mary Mackillop as we share a special connection. Our Alcohol and Other Drug Family Service is based at the Mary of the Cross Centre – Mary Mackillop’s birthplace. This service continues her proud tradition of caring for people at some of the most vulnerable times in their lives.

Belinda’s story

“I fell apart… when my children needed me most.”

“The early years for my four year old son and five year old daughter have been terribly traumatic. It just destroyed me as a parent too. At the beginning of 2009 I fell apart, which wasn’t helping my children when they needed me most.

I went to the doctor to get some anti-depressants. I’ve been depressed many times before and I had always gone on medication - but I had never dealt with the real issues dragging me down. This time, I couldn’t see a way of coming back. My daughter’s kinder teacher recognised I was struggling and encouraged me to seek support from Centacare’s Counselling Service.

When I started counselling, our lives were a mess, the children were a mess and I couldn’t see our lives getting better. I felt there was no one in the community I trusted. No one in my family were there for me in the way I needed them. I just couldn’t trust anyone.”

Download brochure

As well as helping couples work through relationship difficulties, Centacare provides support to refugees seeking to settle in a new land. We offer the professional skills and heartfelt concern of qualified counsellors for individuals battling with anxiety or addictions, and their families. We help children to maintain critical relationships with separated mums and dads and we help those mums and dads who have been through bitter separation to put their children first and leave them out of their battles. We help young people contemplating a life together to communicate more openly. We help to keep prisoners connected to the community and to their families. We offer outreach and pastoral care for those who are living with mental illness and other health problems. If you need help, please contact Centacare on 9287 5555 or go to www.centacaremelbourne.org for information on your closest Centacare branch.

Click here to download brochure and donate now.

Administration:
Cardinal Knox Centre, 383 Albert Street, East Melbourne VIC 3002
Ph: 03 9287 5555 Fax: 03 9287 5599

Centacare depends on the generosity of individuals, families and organisations to maintain and deliver its services and programs.

The services and programs provided by Centacare are for all the community. They seek to address the needs of people at all stages of life and they focus on the family.

Centacare Catholic Family Services continues to promote its vision of Life to the full for families’ individuals and children through our involvement in family relationship counselling, school counselling, refugee settlement services, innovative relationship education, drug and alcohol and loss and grief programs as well as arrange of other support services. The professionalism and dedication of staff ensures that Centacare continues to have a positive healing influence on the lives of many needy families and individuals in Melbourne and Geelong.

Centacare Catholic Family Services invites you to share your commitment to family life through membership of a Friendship Club.

The Friendship Club is a fellowship of people who care and show compassion for the many people in our community who come to Centacare seeking help to rebuild or strengthen their lives.

Friendship Club members see a need for a continuing commitment. By joining together, members’ funds provide the financial security Centacare needs to plan and develop its services to help families who come into its care.

We look forward to sharing with you our commitment to all families and, with your help, to bring love into the hearts of those in pain.

When writing our Will we need to recognise that times change, and what is a pressing issue for society today might not be tomorrow. It is wise therefore to allow the recipient person orinstitution, some degree of freedom in determining how a Bequest can best be used.