Last night Skylight Mental Health conducted its Annual General Meeting and celebrated 40 years of Mental Health services to the SA community.

From humble beginnings of like-minded carers working to make a difference for themselves and the people they cared for in the mid 1980s, we have grown to a statewide service which, in the 2023/24 financial year, assisted more than 2,280 people, employed around 200 staff, and worked from 6 metro and regional offices.

We have built our services on the work and efforts of people with mental health concerns and their carers and have always focussed on providing high quality psychosocial services. Psychosocial services are those where we walk alongside people to build and maintain their capacity to live well in their community. And we have done that with our eyes on recovery as the goal and unwavering support as the promise.

We have worked from numerous locations, evolved through a few different names, employed and trained many of the people working in our sector – and supported thousands of people with mental health concerns and their family and carers.

And we have done that by following our Mission “…to promote acceptance of mental illness in the community and provide quality services for people with mental illness, their family and friends” and not losing sight of our Vision for “a South Australian community which understands mental illness and responds with confidence, respect and hope.”

We have sought to locate ourselves in the metro areas with the most significant disadvantage in SA – and we have chosen those locations because that’s where we think our services are most necessary. We actively promote our lived experience culture and Peer led services and recognise these as the frameworks our participants and their carers should expect.

We have built an organisation that balances NDIS and grant funded services to achieve the best outcomes for people despite the ongoing uncertainty around funding in our sector and we recognise that while significant gains have been made in the past four decades, that real and ongoing critical needs are still unmet despite being clearly outlined and costed in very recent government reports.

We have had the help of many to do this and I would like to extend a particular thanks to:

• Our new, continuing and retiring Board Members who have freely given their time and expertise to maintain our strategic approach
• Our staff, all 200 of them, who build our lived experience culture and who deliver on our promise of high quality services every day

Skylight Mental Health celebrates its 40 years of service, but it remains focused on the jobs yet to be done and, for me, on hope for what could be.

Paul Creedon CEO

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