Fireside Chat Recap: Hobart Women's Shelter with Alice McCoy

Content note: this conversation discusses family violence, housing insecurity, and crisis accommodation. If it brings up a need for support, contact 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732, Tasmania's Family Violence Counselling and Support Service on 1800 608 122, or call 000 in an emergency.

Alice McCoy is the family services team leader at Hobart Women's Shelter — Australia's second-oldest women's refuge, founded on 1 December 1974. She has been there eight years, and she now leads the team that walks with families from the first phone call to the front door of a long-term home.

Most of us picture the crisis: a woman and her kids need a safe place to sleep tonight. Alice's work starts the next morning. What she describes is slower and less visible than the rescue — helping a woman hear her own needs again, practise choice after years without it, live an ordinary life, and end up somewhere that tells her she is worth it.

Safety is more than a roof over your head

The shelter works from a trauma-informed practice framework. In plain terms, Blue Knot Foundation — Australia's national centre for complex trauma — describes this as assuming a person may carry past trauma, and shaping the space, the words, and the choices so that support does not hurt again. Its five principles are safety, trustworthiness, choice, collaboration, and empowerment. It is a way of working, not a therapy: the shelter is not treating trauma, it is trying not to add to it.

Alice applies that from the moment they walk through the door. The team assumes everyone arriving has experienced trauma. That first night looks like a made bed, clean linen chosen for the family, a soft toy picked to suit the children's ages, and a check-in the next morning about sleep, bins, laundry, and food.

"Safe accommodation is about so much more than just putting a roof over somebody's head. We focus very much on a trauma informed practice framework, which means we try and look holistically at those trauma informed needs."

Choice is not simple after control

The people she sees have lost connection with their own needs; those needs have become a reflection of the people around them. Someone may not have chosen dinner, clothes, or when to shower for years, or for their whole adult life. Then they arrive at the shelter and are asked to make a budget and run their own days.

Staff cannot take that over. "It is absolutely not our role to make decisions for people," Alice says — which is exactly why the work has to be patient. Choice, is the thing being rebuilt, not a service being delivered. And she names the part that surprises people: freedom itself can feel unsafe. "And sometimes people don't recognise how controlled they have been until they're in an environment where that control is taken away. And it can be scarier all over again."

"So how do we guide people through that in a way that is safe for them because it doesn't always feel safe to have that freedom if you've never had it before."

Ordinary life is one of the most important parts of recovery and healing

Housing instability does its own damage, and Alice is direct about it. Not knowing where you will sleep, eating tin food because there is no fridge, kids not wanting to go to school because their uniform is unwashed — "just very things that feel very basic to most people aren't basic for everybody."

So ordinary life is not an extra. Alongside the women's legal service, a nurse practitioner, play-based therapy, and family violence counselling on site, there is also space for the ordinary parts of life. Every fortnight, Government House donates a communal meal, and the shelter also runs movie nights. It is all optional. Families can join in, or take the meal back to their own space if sitting down together does not feel right yet.

The shelter even runs a social circus, where kids can play, learn stilts and juggling, meet a man safely, fall over without getting badly hurt, and take physical risks safely. Alice describes that mix of play, trust and adventure as healing — an important part of growing up, with space for mum to play too.

"It can be really healing and just a space to have fun and take some risks in a safe way. So learning to walk on the stilts and do some juggling and feel safe to experience some adventure and maybe fall over but not get really hurt. Just take some safe risks. It's a really important part of growing up. And giving mum some space to play too is pretty fabulous."

How long is long enough?

The time HWS has with families is not driven by what's needed for healing and recovery. Family violence drives urgent demand, and there is very little affordable housing to move on to. Against that pressure, Alice was asked a hypothetical: if you had a magic wand, how long would you want with a family — what is long enough, but not too long?

Alice answered that hypothetical, and she qualified it herself: no evidence base, just what she sees. Her anecdotal working figure is about six months. That is not a recovery timeline and not a claim about how long healing takes; it is her sense of the window in which the shelter can do its part well. She contrasts it with the six weeks that were normal when she started, back when there were places for people to go.

"I don't have a good evidence base for this, but anecdotally, what I see with our families is that six months seems to be around the good months. Like I've been here a long time. And when I started, people were here for six weeks and that was it."

Six months is not a rule. Alice is clear that support is not linear and every family needs something different. Some women arrive with skills and external support already in place and simply need somewhere to stay until their own home is sorted; others need much more intensive support. For Alice, the principle is flexibility: enough time to put the right support in place, work through barriers and rebuild independence — but not so long that a family becomes reliant on the shelter.

"Just long enough to get everything in place and to really help people address some barriers and really get that independence. So they're ready to really thrive when they move out, but not so long that they're reliant."

Elsie and Isabel: beautiful on purpose

Elsie and Isabel are two long-term homes the shelter owns, named after philanthropists who backed the work. They opened in March 2024, house five people, and are the first two of 25 planned long-term homes, funded entirely through philanthropy including the shelter's Buy a Brick campaign. Because HWS owns them, there is no cap on how long a family can stay while they wait for social housing or a private rental. The architects designed them with trauma-informed principles: round windows, timber, reading nooks, hand-carved door knobs, a fenced yard, room for pets.

The detail is the argument. Alice's foil is cookie-cutter social housing — "They all look the same, and you've got what you've got." Every choice in Elsie and Isabel is meant to be read by the woman moving in: someone thought about you. That is the same principle as the chosen linen on night one, at the scale of a house. As Alice puts it, the shelter wants to keep giving women the message that they are worthwhile, that they should value themselves and be valued by others — and that is much harder to do in accommodation that does not support a feeling of being valued.

The shelter turned 50 recently. It started as women taking care of women, and Alice frames the 25 homes as taking care of the women who come next.

"So we just really wanted people to be able to move in and feel like they were really respected in that space. What we often find with social housing is that they're very cookie cutter designs. They all look the same, and you've got what you've got. We wanted these to feel very intentional and for people to feel like they were really well thought of going in there."

How to help

• Build the next home. Hobart Women's Shelter is raising money for the remaining long-term homes through Buy a Brick. This is the campaign that funded Elsie and Isabel.

• Fundraise for the wider network. Nedd's Uncomfortable Challenge runs 19–28 October 2026 and raises money for We Are Mobilise's Kickstarter Program, which supports Mobilise's 50+ charity partners — Hobart Women's Shelter among them.

• Find support near you. Ask Izzy lists housing, food, health, and family violence services across Australia.

Thank you to Alice for her time and incredible expertise 💙