Our StandBy team are proud to be in partnership with AMSANT on the Healing Together workshop. Healing together is a culturally responsive initiative that is focused on strengthening postvention support and social-emotional wellbeing (SEWB) in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory.

This work centres culture, connection, and lived experience. It creates safe spaces for truth-telling, reflection, and collective healing.

We were also fortunate to host the pilot workshop with our StandBy team at the Youturn head office on the Sunshine Coast. The workshop strengthened our shared understanding of what meaningful, community-led postvention looks like.

The Healing Together workshop is not a program imposed on communities, but one built with them, through deep listening, respect, and genuine relationship. At its core is a simple but powerful principle: communities lead the way. StandBy and AMSANT walk alongside, supporting and not directing the process.

“It’s about true partnership. It’s about trust.”
– Kellene Lambert, Regional Manager, StandBy Support NT

This approach recognises that healing doesn’t happen to community – it happens with community. Healing Together is grounded in culture, connection to Country, Elders, family, and the strength that already exists within.

This work is especially important in the Northern Territory, where many communities have experienced gaps in culturally safe postvention support. Through this partnership, there is a strong focus on moving away from fly-in-fly-out models and instead building local capacity and capability.

“When we build workforce up from our local communities, we give back that agency that has been lost through colonisation.”
– Dana McDonald, SEWB Postvention Member Support Coordinator, AMSANT

Healing Together supports communities to strengthen the knowledge they already hold, bridging western approaches with cultural ways of knowing, being, and doing. Ultimately, it is about more than responding to loss, it’s about restoring connection and creating pathways for long-term, sustainable healing.

It’s an honour to partner in such a meaningful initiative. The dedication of the StandBy NT team and partnership with AMSANT reflects what strong collaboration can achieve.

When communities lead, healing becomes stronger, safer, and sustainable.

StandBy is a program of Youturn.