LIKE many great ideas, this one started around the kitchen table.
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Lowesdale nurse and social worker Julianne Whyte was grappling with her dad’s cancer diagnosis and trying to get services for him in eastern Melbourne.
“We couldn’t get the services we wanted for him to be cared for at home,” she says.
“The idea of the Amaranth Foundation started in 2006 during a chat with Dad over the kitchen table and a glass of red wine.”
Mrs Whyte was frustrated by the lack of palliative care and mental health support for people who wanted to stay in their homes like her dad John Santamaria.
“Dad said: ‘Jules, you’re either part of the solution or the problem’,” she says.
With the help of her dad, Mrs Whyte founded the Amaranth Foundation in 2009 to give mental health and social support to terminally-ill people.
“We started in a three-bedroom cream brick house opposite IGA (Corowa); the counselling rooms were right down the back with little privacy and no air conditioning,” she says.
“Now we have a new building that provides us with a plan to do what we want to do – a wrap-around mental health and wellbeing service.
“If we show we care for people’s mental health, they improve, knowing they matter.”
When Mr Santamaria died in 2011, his son Greg Santamaria took over his role on the foundation.