Doors to remain wide open

The founder of Bunbury’s Doors Wide Open has revealed how close the drop-in centre came to closing it doors.

The centre, which provides vital support services to families and individuals experiencing methamphetamine issues, was this week given a cash boost of nearly $84,000 from the State Government.

Founder Lina Pugh revealed to the South Western Times that the funding meant the organisation could stay open.

“We’ve come really, really close to sort of thinking about not being open,” Ms Pugh said.

“We didn’t have a date or anything like that, but we were looking at having to make a decision about what we were going to do.”

The centre has about 70 people in active recovery using the support service on a weekly basis and some every day.

Mrs Pugh said it also provided support to “hundreds and hundreds” of families and the organisation feared that closing its doors would let the community down.

“The rest of the funding we get from the community – they provide us with most of what we want and I think for us closing was more about letting the community down, because they’ve provided so much help and so much support,” she said.

“That would have been just so hard for us and for them, it would have left a lot of people questioning where they’re going to go every day because it’s become a hub of friendship.

“It’s hard to imagine that not being here.”

Ms Pugh acknowledged Bunbury MLA Don Punch and his support of the centre.

“They’ve bent over backwards to ensure that we got this bit of funding, so we are just absolutely grateful to the end that they’ve helped us through,” she said.

“They haven’t lost touch with what we do . . . they know that what we do here works, so they have been our biggest supporters.”