Gandangara Community Healing Centre Team Interviews
Where two worlds meet: Combining
evidence-based treatment with First Nations ways of healing and being
Jamie-Lee Radburn, a Wiradjuri woman, is bringing an integrated model of healing and recovery as Practice Manager at Gandangara’s Community Healing Centre.
A pivotal moment for Jamie-Lee was on a social work placement at a healing centre in Brisbane, Gallang Place. After years working in hospitality and event management, followed by time in community mental health, she saw an approach to healing and recovery she wanted to embrace.
"This was the first time I saw how Western evidence-based practices could sit alongside Aboriginal ways of healing,” she says. “I saw how the two systems could work together to holistically support clients, in a way that was really beautiful."
Now, as Practice Manager at the new Gandangara Community Healing Centre recently opened in July 2025, Jamie Lee has adopted this integrated approach.
"In my experience, services are often siloed and people fall through the gaps or get turned away," she says. "It's exciting to work here at the Centre where people get supported with their substance use, but also with their mental health, grief and loss, housing, financial stress, disability support or health conditions. Everything happens here all in one space."
During her placement, Jamie-Lee worked alongside practitioners who seamlessly blended evidence-based Western psychology practices, such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, with traditional Aboriginal healing methods. These methods included Yarning Circles led by Elders, sand play and creative arts therapies including storytelling, music and dance, bush medicines and tending to the spirit alongside mental and physical wellbeing.
Journey to purpose
As a Wiradjuri woman born in Orange who grew up on Darkinjung Country on the Central Coast, Jamie-Lee's path to this role wasn't straightforward. She moved to Sydney at just 18 and spent a decade working in hospitality and event management, including a stint at Taronga Zoo. But something was missing.
"As great as the animals were — the free access to the zoo and Calypsos - I always felt I had a desire in me to be a social worker," she says. "I think it was there back in high school, to be honest. I just didn't follow it. I probably wasn’t ready."
The long hours, late nights and lifestyle that comes with hospitality eventually pushed her to make the change. She enrolled in a social work degree at ACAP University. "I enjoyed every class I took, and I started working as a mental health worker alongside my degree and that made it real," she says. "I felt I had found the right thing."
Her career change coincided with the NDIS rollout, and she became skilled at advocating for clients to get the best possible outcomes. After a placement stint at Gallang Place and graduating with First Class Honors, she spent the next five years at the Ted Noffs Foundation — Australia's largest provider of alcohol and other drugs addiction services to young people. Here she was both an adolescent and family counsellor, while managing programs across south-west Sydney.
"I loved working with young people, meeting them where they're at, not forcing change on them, but walking alongside them to foster resilience. Our work was in harm minimisation, making sure they knew the risks and how to keep safe and reduce their substance use at their own pace while addressing their mental health and backgrounds of trauma," she says.
Building different
During her time at Ted Noffs, Jamie Lee first encountered Gandangara Health Service, regularly bringing young clients there for support. She was immediately struck by the difference in approach.
"At Gandangara, the nurses and doctors didn't shy away from the complex nature of these young people,” she says. "They did the first aid and patched them up, while taking time to talk respectfully and therapeutically to them."
The Community Healing Centre offers individual counselling, psychology, case management and support from Aboriginal health workers and peer workers with lived experience. Group programs include cultural arts and creative expression, men's and women's business, alongside programs to prevent relapse and build harm minimisation skills.
The centre hosts the monthly Elders’ yarn up, ensuring Elder involvement remains central to the healing process. Prescribing doctors from the health service provide addiction medicine support, while dedicated staff, including counsellors, psychologists, case managers, Aboriginal health workers and peer workers, ensure holistic care.
After years working towards this, Jamie-Lee has found a place that combines science, art and culture into healing. "It's very exciting to be involved in not just a brand-new service, but something that’s so important for the community and particularly this community," she says.
Come back from hell, with a passion for change
For more than ten years, Rebecca Savage has been sober from all substances. During her decade-long sobriety, she’s turned a new page in her life. Now a passionate advocate for First Peoples living with alcohol and drug addiction, Rebecca works as a Senior Case Manager at the Gandangara Community Healing Centre.
"I could not show anybody the way out of hell unless I'd gone through it myself. It's both a burden and a privilege," she says. Working with community experiencing homelessness, mental health, addiction issues and intergenerational trauma, Rebecca draws on her own lived experience to help clients regain a sense of emotional and social wellbeing.
“These people get me. We are the same. We've all felt broken. We've all felt disconnected. And I found that I can make a big difference in this space,” she says.
Rebecca sees healing from addiction as a holistic and lifelong journey that needs "all the right ingredients" to make it work. Gandangara Community Healing Centre brings all this together, she says, including counselling, group work, cultural practices such as smoking ceremonies and art to help clients heal.
“We’re trying to bring old-world practices to a modern medical model to try and close the gap of walking in two worlds," she says.
Lived experience of homelessness, trauma and addiction
From the age of 12, Rebecca experienced homelessness after escaping a violent and loveless home environment. She endured further trauma and developed addiction issues to cope because she felt disconnected and had no sense of identity. “The only things passed on to me culturally were coping mechanisms and intergenerational trauma."
Amidst this turmoil, a part of her fought back against becoming another statistic. “I didn’t want to be the same as everyone else around me. I didn't want to become exactly what the world expected me to be,” she says. “So, I kept myself in school, made sure that I got my year-10 certificate, worked full time at night in hospitality, and gave it a red-hot crack.”
For the next ten years, Rebecca lived a life as “a functioning addict”. She worked long hours as a chef, earned an income and had a home. Drugs were her coping mechanism, a way to numb her past trauma, she says. “Drugs were a solution for a while, until they became the problem.”
When her life eventually spun out of control, escaping domestic violence, Rebecca became homeless again and had her children removed. She decided that her only choice left was to go into long-term residential rehab. “Going into rehab, I thought I was there to just stop using one drug. I quickly found out drugs weren’t the problem; I was,” she says.
Rebecca had to unlearn everything she knew and undo many beliefs and behaviours. Today recovery is not just not using drugs or drinking alcohol; it's trauma, unhealthy relationships, abuse, dysfunction, crime and negative thinking that are no longer a part of her life.
"I work on my addiction every day,” she says. “There is no cure for this disease. It's only treatment and maintenance. I had to change everything around me — people, places and things.”
Serving her community
Although Rebecca tried to return to the hospitality industry, she found she was physically unable. She decided instead to enrol in a Diploma of Community Services at TAFE, which launched her education and growth in the community services sector. She went on to complete other development certificates and a Diploma in Behavioural Therapies.
“I’ve always needed to help people, but study taught me how to do it in a healthy way with boundaries,” she says.
After graduating, she held a variety of case manager roles, working initially at the Haymarket Centre in Sydney. “I had a full-time night shift role, so it was real frontline stuff. I was really in the thick of it,” she says.
In every job, Rebecca widened her experience of working with people from different backgrounds. This included working at the Women and Girls Emergency Centre, South Pacific Private rehab, Wesley Mission and finally Hume Housing. Through a partnership with the Gandangara Local Aboriginal Land Council and Hume Housing, she built a strong relationship and became passionate about their vision for the future.
When Rebecca heard about the opening of the Gandangara Community Healing Centre and that it would be a drug and alcohol drop-in centre for First Peoples in South West Sydney, this seemed to be a job made for her. “I thought: ‘I want to be part of that,” Rebecca says. “To be a part of the community's healing will also heal parts of me, too, and I have a responsibility to show people a way out.”