By Jena Carr
Anglesea Bowling Club is hosting a family fun day to raise awareness for mental health and promote bowls clubs as great supporting networks.
The Anglesea Bowls For Your Lives event on September 16 from 9am to 8pm will host a morning sports challenge, a test of sports skills, sausage sizzle, live music, and a bowls tournament.
President Ben Coyle said the event looked to promote the club as a “safe place” and that all the profits would go towards the Black Dog Insitute for mental health research and suicide prevention.
“Anglesea Bowling Club is trying to not just be a bowls club with the stigma of older generations bowling,” he said.
“I know how good and meditative the sport is. It is like going for a surf or something like that when you can get out and forget about your worries.”
Bowl For Your Lives is an initiative founded in October last year by police officers Shane Hafner and Cameron Ryan, who were diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
Mr Hafner said they found lawn bowling a “very grounding exercise to participate in” and decided to raise money for the Blag Dog Institute through the sport.
“There’s an opportunity here to introduce people to a sport where you’ve got every generation of person there with all life experiences and they become a family,” he said.
“The main objective is to break down the stigma about mental health, and if people have been impacted, they’re in an environment where they don’t feel that they can’t talk about it.”
Mr Hafner said a big issue with mental health was that people thought they had to battle it alone and that a bowls club was a place they could go to where they would be accepted.
“We’re trying to just get people to know that it’s okay if you are impacted by mental health,” he said.
“If people are going through it alone, they’d be surprised just how many people have been impacted.”
Help is available through Lifeline’s 24-hour phone crisis support on 13 11 14.
