Most of us are a little bit curious about the murky world of drug and alcohol addiction, but it takes a special person to make a career helping people affected by it. Anne-Maree Kaser is the CEO of Windana Drug and Alcohol Recovery and this week she shares with us how she got started and what it is like to run the not for profit organisation. Windana operates a residential treatment program, as well as non-residential services across south east Melbourne and Greater Victoria.
Jo Corrigan: You have been the CEO of Windana since 2013. Tell us about your career path leading up to this.
Anne-Maree Kaser: I started a business degree in 1984 but decided pretty quickly that I wasn’t cut out 
at that point to be a business administrator. So I applied for, and got into, nursing training at West Gippsland Hospital. After I graduated I came down to Melbourne and was doing agency work because it gave me flexibility and range of experience.
I always had a fascination with addiction and dependence, the whole intriguing world of drugs, and I was looking in the paper one day for jobs and I found a job that made my heart beat faster. It was with the Smith Street Clinic. I started in this 14 bed open plan, men and women in together, detox in Fitzroy, which is pretty horrendous when you think about it but I loved it. I was pretty much on the floor there and then I was involved in the methadone clinic. In those days, methadone was the only opiate replacement therapy available and people would have to come and pick it up every day at the clinic. The perception is that people who have problems with drugs and alcohol are your stereotypical junkie that you see characterised in the media, but they’re not. They’re just people like you and me who have got themselves tangled up in stuff and end up with a dependence. I don’t want to discount that a lot of people [with addiction] have terrible difficulty with a whole range of other issues – mental health, housing, family violence, that kind of thing – and lot of women were ‘working women’, as in sex working women, but there were people there in well paid jobs with huge responsibility, including nurses.
I was at the Smith Street Clinic for about three years, then moved back to the country and took on a job as a counsellor in the alcohol and drug system up there. We started a home based withdrawal program in Gippsland. At that point my manager was really pushing me to take on more senior roles. I didn’t actually have any belief in myself that I had something to offer, but I did. From that time I’ve taken more and more senior roles. I worked for some time in the public service, managing contracts for the drug and alcohol service providers in Gippsland. I progressed to Executive Director, Community Support at Community Health Service in Gippsland.
I was head hunted for the job at Windana. This is my first CEO role. I’d known about Windana and we were very value aligned in terms of believing that change is possible. I felt like I had something to offer and that this was really bringing me back to my first passion, alcohol and drugs specifically.
JC: What are the difficulties you face running a not for profit?
AK: You know, it is what it is. I think some of the difficulties are the same whether the business is commercial or a not for profit: how do you attract and keep the best staff, making sure that you’ve got the right governance arrangements, getting systems and processes right so that the ship can keep going when key people leave the organisation.
You have to run a really lean organisation. Over the last three years we’ve applied a bit more of a commercial sensibility to how we run the organisation without compromising on people, on clients and the care that we offer. The challenges are around trying to diversify the revenue stream. We rely heavily on government funding and I think that’s a risk for a not for profit organisation. We are about 78% government funded, I’ve got some federal funds and we pursue some other donations. People at the TC, the residential program, do make contributions themselves but it’s variable so we don’t say the ‘cost is such and such’.
We are not funded for aftercare, we put our own money into this to help people stay connected. It’s not rocket science: jobs, friends and houses – good positive relationships and stable housing. If we are serious about helping people make a positive change then we’ve got to get smarter. Don’t just put people through a treatment program and put them out the other end and say ‘well away you go mate’.
JC: Do you find it hard to fundraise when you are competing with groups that invoke a lot more sympathy?
AK: Adults with drug and alcohol problems don’t engender a lot of sympathy. Although having said that, I don’t remember the last time I had a conversation with somebody who didn’t have somebody either in their direct family or in their network that has been genuinely impacted by this. We’ve had very generous support from people who choose to remain anonymous because, I think, of that stigma around having an association with a dependence. We’ve had great support from individuals and we’re working on developing some relationships with philanthropic trusts and corporates.
JC: What do you do to deal with the stresses of your job?
AK: It can be stressful at times. I’ve got great people on the ground who do the most important work and that’s the one on one dealing with the people who come to us for support. But in terms of managing an organisation it can be stressful. I am almost 51 and it has taken me up to about this point to acknowledge that I stress! I kind of prefer to think of myself as a bit zen but…
I ride {a motorbike}. I find riding very fast relaxing. It’s not possible to think of all of the things I am thinking about when you’ve got to concentrate on getting around that corner without crashing. I really love that. I read. I listen to music.
JC: Advice for someone wanting to work in the drug and alcohol recovery space?
AK: People who want to have a clinical role, I’d say get yourself some great qualifications. We have several staff with post graduate qualifications in psychology, social work, public health and the like. Life experience is invaluable too. We have an approach, like a lot of other drug and alcohol service providers, where we value people with lived experience of dependence and treatment. So people who are well established in their recovery who have a least a Certificate IV in Alcohol and Drug, they can come and have a role to play in the organisation.
JC: Is it common for people to want to come back and work at Windana after they have been there as clients?
AK: Absolutely. People say all the time they have benefited so much they want to come back and give back. Which is great, but I often encourage people to live in the world outside. They’ve been so enmeshed in problematic use and then the recovery, it’s a central theme for them. It’s important to do something else, then come back.
JC: What types of addiction do you see?
AK: People will think that ice is the biggest problem in the community at the moment because it’s very much in the media. Typically, it’s alcohol, closely followed by heroin. I would say that in the most recent twelve months we have seen an increase in methamphetamine, a lot of cannabis, a lot of prescription pills. We are seeing in our young person’s unit now all of those plus a lot of synthetic drugs, a lot of synthetic cannabis. It’s very rare that we have somebody present with only one issue.
We’ve helped people from very advantaged backgrounds and others from very disadvantaged backgrounds. Dependence is a great leveller. From kids or adults who’ve grown up in a household where nobody ever got up and went to work, right up to private school privileged kids and beyond.
JC: What characterises successful rehabilitation?
AK: That’s a hard question. We shouldn’t characterise success as somebody coming through treatment and coming out the other side and never again having to re-engage in treatment or being abstinent forever more. It’s not realistic. This is generally chronic and relapsing. I’ve had people come through Windana several times.
I’m thinking about a gentleman who arrived about the same week I started at Windana. He’d been a client of Windana previously, he’d done two stints at the rehab and he was struggling to get in that day, our waitlist was so long. At the time I was trying to balance that obvious window of opportunity with that person who’s motivated and ready at the time, with eighty people on the wait list who’ve never had an opportunity to get in the front door. He’s had 16 custodial sentences in his life, he had up until the last 12 months never had a job, never had a licence, never had a car. He walked into my office the other day, three years straight and sober. I said “Is that you I saw driving down the road?”. He said, “Yep, my first ever car, the first time I’ve had a licence”. He is working. He’s got sole custody of his son and is just doing amazing work.
So that’s a huge success but on the other hand somebody who’s been in treatment for three or four weeks, started to address their primary health issues, and learned some strategies to help them reduce the risk to themselves and other people when they are back out in the community, that’s also a success.
The whole community comes together to support and celebrate somebody graduating from the program and nine times out of ten that person is sitting at the front of the room, flanked by their family and friends. It’s not at all uncommon for those relationships to have been re-established during the time they have been in rehab. The number of parents who cry at the graduation and say “Thank you, you brought my boy back. I thought I’d lost him”. The adults who’ve got their kids, who’ve been in care for years and years, now sitting beside them again… It’s just remarkable.
JC: What steps do you think we need to take to address society’s drug and alcohol problems?
AK: We are losing, have lost, the war on drugs. The idea that you can prosecute and apprehend your way out of this is just an absolute nonsense because free market prevails and people are getting very rich on the misery of others. We are forcing dependent people into criminalised behaviour then criminal consequences of that behaviour.
JC: Would you say just decriminalise, or legalise?
AK: I would say regulate, decriminalise, make legal. You could have a whole article on that. Some countries like Portugal, have completely reversed and legalised, but then used the money that was previously spent on prosecuting people and put it into prevention and treatment. If we want to reduce harm, prevent deaths, we should be talking about establishing safe injecting rooms, putting people in touch with the right support. You’ve got to move away from the way we isolate people. We quarantine. We’ve got to give people opportunities.
I’m not suggesting we legalise heroin and methamphetamine and you have it available to pick up at your chemist or supermarket. But if you take away the illegality, it removes the profit motive, so you can manage and support people who are already dependent and you are preventing a whole lot of new users coming into the arena on the back of gateway drugs.
For more information on Windana see here.
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