My thoughts are very much centred around the precious gift of life as I sit here with my 100 year old father in his last days. What a blessing to have enjoyed a good father’s love and care for so many years.

He leaves a legacy of love and service, one I have been strongly influenced by and which accounts in some part for my long association with Open Doors. Contributing to the good of your community in whatever way you can is a value my brothers and I were raised with, and it rubbed off. I’m sure you have a similar outlook, in fact your support for Open Doors proves it, and for that I sincerely thank you.

Open Doors Annual report for the Year 2020

As I write, our counsellors are once more working from home as COVID restrictions again affect Melbourne where our centre is based. Thanks to the online platforms now available, we can quickly move to video conferencing for all clients. Face to face is preferable but online works well as a substitute and is perfect where distance presents a problem to accessing services. Many of our current clients live too far from our Ringwood centre to easily attend in person and it is great to be able to offer them this alternative, COVID or no COVID.

Lockdown remains for us in Melbourne. It certainly has been a challenging couple of years, especially for those who are already dealing with difficult personal situations. I hope you are faring well wherever you are!

Our counsellors continue to work from home and are doing wonderful work on the phone and online. We have quite a number of new post abortion clients, some referred by other services which is always good to see. One of our local hospitals has referred several women to Open Doors following abortion for foetal abnormality. This would not happen if they did not view our service as professional and trustworthy. I’d like to give a shout out to one of our volunteer counsellors, Pat, who is currently supporting four post abortion clients. Pat is a wonderful counsellor and has been with Open Doors for many years.