Our story

Centacare Catholic Community Services began its life as the Catholic Family Welfare Bureau in 1942. Archbishop Matthew Beovich appointed the agency’s first Director – Miss Hannah Buckley, a 21 year old graduate from the newly formed School of Social Work at Adelaide University – with the aim of coordinating the activities of the various Catholic orphanages and homes across Adelaide. 

From the outset, the Bureau experienced resistance to this impossible task. It soon found its focus shifting from coordination of established agencies to direct personal welfare services in areas not already covered by other groups within the Church. 

An early focus of the agency – and Buckley in particular – was the need to reform children’s institutions and make them more focused on the wellbeing of the child, with special commitment to physical and emotional development. This child-focus remains a core value of Centacare to this day. 

Centacare’s small team during this period concentrated primarily on child-focused work with orphanages and re-settlement of migrants from post-war Europe. A general casework field also developed in response to community need. 

Much of the Bureau’s work involved supplementing the basic work done by the Immigration Department in the re-settlement of these newest migrants. The services provided were a combination of normal social work support and specifically religious activities such as arranging for religious instruction for migrant children and liaison with migrant chaplains. 

A new Social Welfare Act, a new Adoptions Act, and the Matrimonial Causes Act allowed Centacare to partner with the government in the new field of marriage counselling, with staff and volunteers trained professionally by the Marriage Guidance Council. 

This time also marked the beginning of the de-institutionalisation of orphanages around South Australia. Many children were moved into ‘cottage homes’ under the administration of the Archdiocese, and the Bureau’s social workers regularly visited these homes to work with the children and their families. 

It then became possible to plan more individually for each child, particularly in areas of educational and emotional needs, and to work with the child and family towards reunification.

Centacare began providing Natural Family Planning services in response to the Pope’s encyclical Humanae Vitae (“of Human Life”), and the team quickly grew to more than 50 trained natural family planners, most of them volunteers.

Though the agency was operating in the fields of general casework, children’s services, migration, marriage guidance and natural family planning, it was still small in the sense that it was unable to have a major influence on community welfare. Regardless, it’s expanding workforce began paving the way for a more focused advocacy role in the areas of income, housing and employment where there was most need for social change.

New model of ‘working with’ clients in a process of mutual enrichment. This was revolutionary in the way it recognised the function of Centacare was not for workers to be ‘expert advisors’ or coordinators in their clients’ lives, but rather walk alongside them and learn from their experiences.

The importance of the role of the Bureau as a personal service agency to clients who are particularly vulnerable was highlighted in the agency’s 1982 mission statement, which outlined the following three objectives: 

• The well-being of families 
• The well-being of persons with special needs or in distress 
• A socially just society 

In each of these areas the focus was not only on direct support for the individual or family in need - the scope of the agency’s mission was expressly expanded to include such things as the monitoring of legislation and policy decisions, cooperation with other welfare bodies in community development, and advocacy for persons or groups who were victims of unjust decisions.

In 1996 the agency officially changed its named from Catholic Family Welfare Bureau to Centacare Catholic Family Services, in line with a number of other Catholic agencies across Australia.

With the appointment of the agency’s longest-serving director, Dale West, in 1989, Centacare entered a time of significant growth by expanding service provision into the crucial areas of Disability Services, Youth Homelessness, Mediation, and Employment Services. It also began incorporating a number of independent agencies under the Centacare umbrella, including those involved in the provision of services for women escaping domestic violence. 

Through this period of change, Centacare valued its people as its most important resource and was noted for its extraordinary capacity to attract and retain people of the highest quality. The agency recognised that each staff member brought unique gifts to their work within their professional expertise, and this coupled with stable, values-driven leadership helped develop a strong culture and reputation for being a remarkable organisation.

Funding gaps were an ongoing issue for many social services organisations in the early 2000s. Centacare staff and leadership pitched in and began a strong tradition of fundraising through challenge activities such as abseiling, sky diving, fun runs, and trekking Kokoda and Everest Base Camp under the coordination of longest serving Centacare employee and assistant director at the time, Bernie Victory.

Centacare also embarked on an ambitious journey of agency-wide quality accreditation in 2001, thus beginning a demanding continuous quality improvement process that transformed the agency’s governance processes and reinforced the already high standards of service provision. 

Throughout the last decade or so, Centacare has been balancing society’s need for responsive and inclusive services with a strong commitment towards innovation.

Under the compassionate guidance of deputy director Pauline Connelly, the 2010s saw the launch of Centacare’s Reconciliation Statement and first Reconciliation Action Plan, along with the design and implementation of a suite of mandatory staff training courses in the areas of Aboriginal Culture, Cultural Competence and Child Protection.

Today Centacare is strongly focused on designing evidence-based program models underpinned by research and evaluation, to expand the social impact of the work we do and drive change across the South Australian community and beyond.

Each year we renew our commitment to delivering person-centred and inclusive services so that everyone who walks through our doors feels seen, heard, safe, valued and connected. 

In 2022, we celebrated 80 years. You can read our feature on The Southern Cross here.