Lara Ducasse has been at Success Works for five weeks as the new Candidate Support Coordinator. Her role includes onboarding women to do job readiness workshops and talking to other service providers. Prior to joining Success Works, she was a co-facilitator of the Men’s Behaviour Change Program a voluntary program to help men address and change their use of violence.
Lara sees herself as ‘a good example of hope’ as someone who has moved away from a long history of being part of the criminal justice system relating to her juvenile and early life. She has been in recovery for 29 years and has turned her life around completely.
She has a Diploma in Community Service with long time work in the community sector. Her biggest influence was her children and the effect her life choices were having on them was a reason to change and the fact that she wanted to feel that she could do ‘something good’ and be a ‘good person’.
Despite advice when she was studying that she shouldn’t talk about her lived experience, Lara feels that ‘it was such a contradiction as how we are going to learn help others if we can’t talk to people through our lived experience?’
Having a job at Success Works feels like she has done ‘full circle’, and it is not without a degree of irony that she sees having a criminal record for once has had an advantage,
“I feel like I have finally been able to come to a place where I’m accepted in society [despite] what has happened in my past… I can totally be myself now. It is great to be in an environment where ‘everyone gets it’.”
Lara sees her role as Candidate Support Officer combined with her lived experience is a bonus for the candidates:
“It helps them with their self-esteem, and it helps to show them they are not alone and that someone else has walked a similar path. It gives them inspiration as they can see someone who has achieved success…and you can turn your life around.”
There is also the very real sense of comfort and reassurance as the women working at Success Works with a criminal record are not carrying that ‘heavy shame’. There is more of level playing field where the staff are not operating from a higher level and looking down. As Lara said:
“That is what makes the difference. When I started studying, I felt down here [gestures to a lower level] and everybody was up here [gestures up] and looking down on me all the time.”
Lara has a delightful confidence about her approach to applying for work, but she knows how difficult it can be for women in the Success Works program as they go for jobs. She is happy to be up front with an employer if asked about her criminal record to say, ‘What is there about my record that would stop me being employed.’ She says this statement will often break the ice and there can then be a conversation about what is at stake.
One of Lara’s aims when delivering the Success Works workshops is to talk to the women and role model to them by normalising the idea of what it means to have a criminal record. Some of the alarm around women with a criminal record needs to be transparent and resolved openly. Many women have a criminal record because of driving offences or offences that are a direct result of trauma. Lara said, ‘Just because you have a criminal record doesn’t mean you’re a serial killer, or inherently a bad person’.
Lara believes that strong advocacy is needed to help prevent the stigma associated with women having a criminal record and her role at Success Works will provide an opportunity to taking that on board. To conclude, Lara is very grateful to have the job at Success Works as ‘it keeps me humble because I haven’t forgotten where I’ve come from… I know the struggle and the struggle is real.’
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