$70,000 for a Needy Cause

Pictured: Joe Gollan, Joanne McCarthy, Mick Breen artist, Jan McDonald Carrie’s Place.

It doesn’t make for light holiday reading, but the Hunter Region has one of the State’s highest family and domestic violence rates.

In the last few years alone, there have been several high profile and graphic murders of women and children in our own backyard. And summer time and the festive season is traditionally when rates of violence peak across the region.

And it makes you wonder, who is there to help when those most in need think they have no one to turn to? And who backs those willing to fight the good fight?

For more than 35 years, Maitland’s ‘Carrie’s Place’ has been there. At the end of the phone, at the end of the worst arguments, the worst violence, the worst days of many people’s lives.

It’s a unique place offering hope, an escape, a chance to start again, with support, a few basic necessities and a shoulder to cry on. But it in turn needs our help.

Over the last 12 months a band of volunteers led by local Joe Gollan worked tirelessly towards organising a huge variety night with all proceeds going towards ‘Carrie’s Place’, to help fund much-needed renovations for their current premises…

Story Penny Evans. Images Ariane Madden Neale.