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"People on dialysis need to get back out there to their communities for cultural reasons, to be there with the family, to be there with the other relations and make themselves happy. All the renal patients should have this chance to go out and have a visit".
Smithy Zimran Tjampitjinpa
The Jimmy Little Foundation has had an ongoing association with the The Western Desert Nganampa Walytja Palyantjaku Tjutaku Aboriginal Corporation since 2004. Initially the JLF help with extra funding for a return to country program run by WDNWPT from their headquaters at "The Purple House" in Alice Springs NT.
The program gave patients and carers a chance to make short visits home to their remote communities between dialysis session, and providied a sense of hope for the future. More than one hundred people, their carers and families from more than thirty remote communities in Central Australia had the chance to return home regularly. The Foundation has also helped patients who were dialysing in Darwin to return to East Arnhem Land for important ceremonies like the Garma Festival in Yolgnu country.
The next logical step to the return to country program is a mobile renal truck that can travel to communities and provide dialysis service for patients who need to get home. The Jimmy Little Foundation has sourced funding from Medicines Australia for a truck to be built and operated by WDNWPT.
“If we don’t do something there is a real chance that they [indigenous Australians] will be wiped out before the end of the century.”
Prof Paul Zimmett, Director of the International Diabetes Institute,
Referring to the diabetes epidemic which invariably leads to kidney failure.
Uncle Jimmy Thumbs up
The Foundation in partnership with the Fred Hollows Foundation trialled a nutrition education program to promote healthy food choices for children and their families who depend on supplies from remote community local stores. Promoting healthy eating for young people is the key to changing the pattern of the early on set of diabetes that leads to many of the chronic diseases that are decimating our Indigenous poplulation. The Foundation is working with many others to find innovative and culturally appropriate ways of assisting Indigenous Australians turn around the current health situation.
A MESSAGE FROM JIMMY
Dear Friends and Supporters
After my kidney failure and a transplant that saved my life, I became very aware that kidney disease is a major problem for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, especially for those living in Central and Northern Australia where the rate of kidney disease is as much as fifty times the national average.
Fortunately, I could access dialysis facilities just minutes from my home in Sydney, but people in the heart of our nation - and in some regional centres - must leave home and relocate up to six hundred kilometres away to places like Alice Springs. It breaks their families, their communities, their finances and their spirits.
I established The Jimmy Little Foundation to do something positive for those afflicted with kidney disease so we asked the people in communities and in the dialysis centres what we could do to help.
The answer was loud and clear. “We want the chance to go back to our country to keep our families and communities together. We need to keep the Dreaming alive”.
With your support kidney patients and their families in regional and remote Australia will benefit from your financial and emotional support.
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