by Laurel Lloyd-Jones | May 11, 2026 | Articles, Indigenous, NEST, Newsletter, Projects
In 2024 Elm Grove Trust created an educational committee the Narooma Education Support Team (NEST) and we have seen the significant benefits to students at Narooma High School through exciting and innovative programs made possible by some wonderful donors.
In 2025 our Trust was fortunate to be awarded a grant from the Foundation for Rural & Regional Renewal (FRRR) to cover the materials to further develop the ‘Hands on Learning’ Program and ‘Murrawan-Dhanga Bush Nursery’ horticultural program which we have seed funded since 2018.
These out of classroom programs ‘Murrawan-Dhanga Bush Nursery’ covering horticulture, traditional bush tucker plants for food and medication, (including a green house and large covered potting-on area), and the ‘Hands on Learning’ woodwork and building program have both continued to excitingly expand.
Our newest project Native Bees has been to provide funds for the introduction of native bees for pollination in the horticulture program.
A traditional ‘bark canoe project’, in 2025 under guidance from an Indigenous instructor saw cultural pride and an impressive outcome that built confidence and self-belief in the young students. All of these programs are overseen by experienced and enthusiastic educators. Our Nest volunteers continue to support the school’s Breakfast Club project which runs every morning providing a healthy and supportive start to the student’s day.
We have offered Scholarships and Encouragement Grants for young people over the past five years. Some of those recipients have been students from Narooma High School and these funds have been supportively co-managed by the executive staff and the recipient to ensure maximum beneficial progression of their inspirational endeavours.
We have recently provided a scholarship fund for an exceptionally gifted Year 8 student, at Narooma High School. Millie has demonstrated outstanding talent and dedication as a pianist. Millie ingeniously created a paper keyboard and taught herself to play at home despite not having a piano. This gifted young girl’s passion has brought forth outstanding talent and remarkable promise for a future career in music. As part of Millie’s development, the school is looking to provide specialised tuition that will hone her skills to the highest level and foster her musical potential. Elm Grove Trust has happily committed to cover Millie’s estimated tuition cost of $720 each term for this year.
Hands on Learning Program
An excellent all-weather awning structure completed by ‘Hands on Learning’ students enhances their future employment prospects
Horticultural Program:
‘Murrawan-Dhanga Bush Nursery’ horticultural program’s new ‘potting on’ enclosure
In late 2025 students in this program travelled to Nowra to tour Waminda’s Kareela Ngura Garden in Nowra NSW. Kareela Ngura brings together permaculture and local Indigenous knowledge and practices into one community hub; and Yanaga Dhugan which encourages Aboriginal Women to enter the workforce within a framework. More information – https://waminda.org.au/
Students were introduced to native bees used for pollination and the decision to introduce them into their bush nursery at Narooma High was made. Our Trust was happy to provide the funding to purchase these bees, made possible by a generous and supportive couple who make regular donations in support of the Murrawan-Dhanga Bush Nursery horticultural program. This is now underway as plans are made for correct timing for separating the bees and training in the care of the bees and collection of the honey.
Under direction the students have now built a wooden hive to await the arrival of their bees
Some further exciting news – Presenter Clarence Slockee from the ABC Gardening Australia program has recently been to the school to film a future segment for their program. Students have been interviewed, and the background vision has been filmed, so we will keep you posted on this.
We reach out in the strong desire that ongoing funds can continue to be found. We have seen young people flourish and find hope for their futures when they know that they are supported.
If you are as excited as we are about supporting these programs and offering encouragement grants and scholarships, then please consider supporting us with a donation – small, large, one-off or regular. All donations are tax deductible. We cherish your support and offer our genuine thanks for your donations.
The primary purpose of the Elm Grove Sanctuary Trust is to offer support, encouragement and hope for all people, irrespective of race or creed, especially when in need. Based upon a deep compassion for all life and respecting the beauty of our natural world, it seeks to draw attention to ways in which we can live more simply, responsibly and harmoniously with each other and our Earth.
WE NEED YOUR SUPPORT
Your donation to ELM GROVE SANCTUARY TRUST will help us continue to enrich the lives of others. Your contributions enable:
- equity of opportunity in education for our younger generation
- encouragement through annual scholarships
- promotion of peace through relationship
- respect for diversity and inclusiveness
- responsible and innovative environmental projects
- support for other organisations that align with our purposes.
Please consider making either a one off, monthly or annual donation.
Your donation is tax deductible.
All amounts, small or large, offer a wonderful opportunity and they are receipted.
DONATE HERE
Join us as an Associate Member – we need volunteers to assist with administration and outreach, or subscribe and contribute to our quarterly newsletters to share ideas.
For more information email us – egstrust2@gmail.com
by Laurel Lloyd-Jones | Apr 19, 2026 | Articles, Indigenous, NEST, Newsletter
As a Franciscan and a Social Worker who has supported people over many years, I have seen the lasting effect that stress; feelings of powerlessness; and lack of care and support has on people’s lives. At this time, more than ever, people are grieving, confused and feeling totally powerless to change the tragic events, with genocide and wars occurring in our world due to the actions of world leaders playing dangerous power games.
Our everyday lives are being affected and despair is growing day by day. One woman recently expressed her despair at what is happening to innocent families affected by the war in Palestine and Lebanon which goes on without any restraints placed upon the US or Israel.
She said, “It is healing to surround myself with others who are heartbroken over the killing of innocent people, even though I still need to go and scream into the ocean on some days. I find that being with people with caring and just values for human rights does help me to carry on. Otherwise, I would actually go crazy. I mean – how do we see Israel drop 100 bombs in ten minutes killing over 300 men, women and children and just go about our lives as if nothing has happened? I need to acknowledge this madness that is taking place while our world sleepwalks through genocide. I need to share my feelings and to find a way to carry on.”
Hearing this statement, I asked myself how do we maintain a sane and caring presence in our lives here and now despite such madness? I believe that more than ever we need to come together to care for each other. In that caring and listening we can restore our integrity through action within our local community even if we cannot change world affairs directly. We can focus on the positivity of offering friendship and hope to those who find life almost too heartbreaking to function effectively at present. From this can come opportunities for us to reach out in supportive and positive initiatives to find ways to build stronger links, and to feel empowered to make a difference and enable a greater sense of purpose for our lives.
No matter what age we are, we all need a nest in which to feel safe and supported in friendship and caring. This is even more important in times of great uncertainty. This is affirmed in the comments of Darcia Narvaez, PhD –
“We are immersed in species-atypical spaces growing species-atypical human beings. Our baselines for what we think is normal have shifted so much we do not realize how atypical we are. Atypical environments leave us dysregulated, easily upset, and disruptive. Species-typical childhoods nurture a healthy neurobiology, sociality, and compassionate morality. Species-typicality, our evolved nest, is needed for species and planetary wellbeing.”
Dysregulation involves sudden and intense outbursts of anger, sadness, despair or anxiety that are difficult to calm and these outbursts can lead to very destructive actions that compound the situation further extending the sense of isolation. Unresolved emotion can lead to physical and psychological illnesses and further disruption for our lives.
This is an important time for us all to reach out to others who are struggling with life and finding little purpose or power to change what has been the cause of their grief. All who care for human values, truth and justice and who desire to live in peace and understanding of others are seeking ways ahead to build hope and confidence for a better future. I would urge you to seek ways to come together with others who share these desires. Begin in simple ways through caring, sharing the pain and listening to each other. This will show you the pathway forward together that will rebuild hope and restore those true humanitarian values. Let us begin building nests all over to nurture, restore and transform uncertainty into love and action as a community of ‘Earthlings’ working as a team.
One way that our charity is seeking to build hope in our local community here on the South Coast of NSW is through support of our young people by funding educational projects and scholarships to enable equity of opportunity for students for whom these possibilities are too often denied. See: Projects undertaken with support from Elm Grove Trust’s NEST project.
As we gather to heal our shared grief and to restore our humanity together, let us look widely for ways that each of us might build nests of support and to find ways to restore hope at this time when our world for many seems to have lost its way. Create your own unique nest within your local community and begin the restoration of hope and purpose for the future of our world. In strength we can combine our voices to call our leaders back to humanity and lasting peace.
Sister Laurel Clare Lloyd-Jones lfsf
Executive Director
Elm Grove Sanctuary Trust
by Laurel Lloyd-Jones | Nov 14, 2025 | Newsletter
As we came together for our 2025 AGM my thoughts had been with the importance of balance for our board members and the direction of our charity. Our lives get caught up with action so easily, and I feel that it is important for us to consider this as a group, so I have some shared reflections on what is deep inner contemplation. Both so necessary if we are to achieve our intentions.
Miriam – Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann’s reflection on Dadirri describes it as ‘inner, deep listening and quiet, still awareness. Dadirri recognises the deep spring that is inside us. We call on it and it calls to us.’
Thomas Merton’s reflection on Contemplation describes it as ‘listening in silence, and expectancy – it takes silence to grasp higher revelations’.
AI describes it as ‘finding balance between action and contemplation that involves creating a cyclical rhythm where each enhances the other, preventing either from dominating. This balance is achieved by intentionally integrating moments of self-reflection, rest, and internal work (contemplation) with outer engagement and service (action), leading to a centred life rooted in deeper understanding and purposeful engagement with the world. It is a centreing pivot point where you can maintain your internal equilibrium while holding the world’s suffering’.
Franciscan Richard Rohr states – When we named the Centre for Action and Contemplation, I hoped our rather long name would itself keep us honest and force us toward balance and ongoing integration. However, over the years, I have witnessed how many of us attach to contemplation or to action for the wrong reasons. Introverts may use contemplation to affirm quiet time; those with the luxury of free time sometimes use it for “navel-gazing.” On the other hand, some activists see our call to action as an affirmation of their particular agenda and not much else. Neither is the delicate art and balance that we hope to affirm’.
Elm Grove Sanctuary Trust from its formal beginning in 1987 was named ‘a Centre of Hope’ and this has sought to express our purpose as ‘living and teaching by example’ through a decisive engagement in our social order. Through action based upon love for humanity and our natural world, it has been balanced and based upon deep inner listening, and reflection on our actions if they were for the higher good. Much has been achieved due to this balance.
Action or contemplation alone will not resolve the issues that we face in our world. Balance is essential if we are to bring change and hope for the future. This is a time of planetary challenge and disruption affecting us all – so balance is greatly needed.
Love is paramount and it is the powerhouse for all that we seek to offer in transforming and offering hope into the future. It is the glue that binds it all together. We seek to act in solidarity and universal responsibility on this journey, based upon either dadirri or contemplation – whatever one names it – in order to find balance.
by Laurel Lloyd-Jones | Nov 14, 2025 | Newsletter
The following extract from Chapter 13 (page 223) of our book ‘The Elm Grove Story’ – a mystical journey perhaps defines the challenge that our world now needs urgently to address. The need for a Universal Spirituality that moves beyond the divisions created by various faiths and creeds.
______________________________________
“The difference we were detecting in some people’s attitudes was that their rigidity of belief closely aligned with the dogmatism often found in religious structures despite many of them having formally rejected religion. In others we saw the emergence of an evolving spiritual connection coming through their heart’s intuitive search rather than through a reasoned logic based upon religious teaching. They were finding this within their personal spiritual aspect and it was focused upon their desire to create a world that was in harmony on every level.
This moved them beyond the ego and self-consciousness to their essential spiritual essence opening within them the Cosmic Christ. Jesus and many religious leaders of other religions, such as the Buddha, embodied and exampled the Cosmic Christ.
Father Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest who founded the Centre for Action and Contemplation in 1987 in Albuquerque, New Mexico provides greater understanding of the term Cosmic Christ in his statement:
‘Much of Christianity has made Jesus Christ into a denominational saviour figure while others have looked upon his saving grace as limited to a few who meet strict qualifications. But what about creation as a whole? How far back and forward in time does the Christ figure extend, and who exactly is Christ?
Christian scripture, in fact, gives us Jesus’ place in that history counted in billions of years if you look for it – in the prologue to John’s Gospel, for example, or in the Pauline hymns of the letters to the Colossians and Ephesians, or in the opening of John’s first letter. All speak of Christ existing from all eternity. We just don’t see those references. They’ve never been unpacked for the majority of Christians, and we don’t have theology to know how to see it.
Christ is not Jesus’ last name. The book of Acts says God has raised up Jesus and anointed him as the Christ. Our new awareness of the cosmos’ vastness and unimaginably ancient history is forcing us to rehear those scripture texts. It’s exciting good news. The Jesus we now have, the Jesus we participate in, are graced by, are redeemed by, is the risen Christ, the eternal Christ. The word ‘Christ’ means ‘the anointed one,’ and that anointment by God includes us and all of creation.’
Reprinted by permission of NCR Publishing Company.
It seemed that God was calling us to live from a Cosmic Christ consciousness and identity based upon our common humanity while respecting the many different expressions of faith and our care for the environment. My vision back in Sydney in 1982 had expressed this very clearly. Our hope was that Elm Grove Sanctuary was enabling people to explore the more profound spiritual aspects of their lives and it was heartening to be receiving feedback from our guests confirming this.”
____________________________________
Since the publication of our memoir in 2022 we have received some affirming feedback from people of many faith backgrounds and belief structures, or of none, who have enjoyed our story which we chose to share from a very personal and lived experience.
Some comments from a while back, and some more very recent ones, led me to think that I should share a few with you.
Angela Young shared this message -“I walked into the pastoral care team meeting at the hospital today, and my friend Judy came over to me, so full of enthusiasm, as she had recently finished reading yours and Ed’s book. I had given it to her at the beginning of September. She was very impressed by your life journey and loved the whole spiritual approach so much that she told her daughter who is a teacher of religious education in a Catholic school. Her daughter immediately ordered one of your books. Judy is asking me where she can get more copies of your book to pass around as she’d love to give them to people.”
Jonathon McKeown from Sydney thought it an ‘extraordinary’ read – ‘This is a truly amazing story of how God chose two unsuspecting people out of the blue, and of how they responded to that call in faith. From the very first pages the incredible way God revealed himself and his purpose for Edwin and Laurel compels the reader to keep turning page after page in eager expectation.
Even the most sceptical readers will be given grounds to doubt their disbelief. The whole story is told in a tone of deep humility and gratitude though, which for me sets it apart and makes it a truly inspiring and encouraging testimony about what it means to trust God one day, one step at a time. It has challenged me to trust that I will be given exactly what I need at every moment, in every circumstance I find myself, if only I am open to that grace that is only invisible to me because I am a finite creature that cannot grasp with my limited mind the infinite grace of God that is unfolded to us in time, or at least in a lifetime.
Laurel and Ed have honoured their God in this testimony of how that grace unfolded for them in their own lives which was a long journey of faith that became their life’s work. Definitely worth reading. It may even change your life!’
And these very recent excerpts from Carmelite Sister Mary Magdalen’s reflections after her second reading of ‘The Elm Grove Story’.
‘It’s been a long time since I first wrote to you, following Ian Wilson’s “introduction”. I am re-reading The Elm Grove Story currently, and find myself more full of gratitude and admiration than the first time round. Your life without the near-death experience, or without your doing anything about it, would have been very different, and would have meant so much loss for those who eventually came there for healing. You must be so grateful to the Lord for all He has done for and through you (both of you, and all involved). Edwin’s humility, and your common sense, comes out more strongly than when I first read it. I know you rejoice in what the Lord has done for you.
Do you know of St. Mariam of Jesus Crucified Bouardy, the Arab Carmelite? Hers is an amazing story – and at the beginning she had her throat slashed by an overzealous Moslem. She should really have died, and later medical evidence shows how true and horrendous that slash was – but “a nun in blue”, as Mariam says, cared for her in a cave. She does not call her Our Lady, but your Lady in the blue dress reminded me of her…
I have been struck more than the first time by the enormity of the “work” – work of God first of all, as He initiated it; and the work of yourself and Edwin too, helped down the years by many other hands, for varying lengths of time and effort.
You needed all the courage and faith – and continuing encouragement and sustaining by God – to begin, then to keep on persevering, in deep trust. The trust, of course, grew with every new proof of God’s faithfulness. But faith of this sort is like walking in a fog, seeing only the immediate steps to tread, but not the whole path to the end. I think God greatly values it when we trust Him in this way.
I mentioned my own going to PNG in darkness and hanging on (it was that!) and hoping things would work out. I clung to the line in psalm 50 (which at that time we recited on the way to the refectory for midday meal) “give me back the joy of Your help…” I had no joy in my life at that time, and I laughed in sympathy with you, the time you and Natasha had to struggle with heavy groceries up the driveway to the house in pelting rain, and you yelled into the wind, “Why did you bring us to this God-forsaken place?” It all reminds me, too, of the relationship He and St. Teresa had – so intimate and accepting of her weaknesses and struggles to follow His leading. Once He addressed her as “little sinner”, I’m sure with a teasing, tender look.
The work on your part was enormous, not only in establishing the Sanctuary and other buildings as time went on, but all the programmes and workshops you organised and gave. And the heart-breaks and troubles endured…you needed trust to keep on persevering. God supports us as we need. There is no inner message for most of us because we are not asked to do what you were asked to do. He gives His help as we need… Again, He is training us in trust. And as we grow in that, it’s so wonderful to know His fidelity.
I noted on page 452 what was said: This place will always be a holy place and from it will flow healing energy. And so it is, and will be, no matter who ‘owns’ the property. The Lord works through all instruments, willing and strong, as well as faltering and lukewarm – I know you know this too. And what He has begun He will uphold.
I also cried – well, had misty eyes – with you as you said your farewells. I know how hard it was for me to leave PNG after more than half my life-time there, and where I knew God had called me to go. I of course did not start a whole new venture, as you did, so it was much more difficult for both of you, having put so much sweat and blood (literally) into Elm Grove to step aside.
Another thought, which I’d had previously too but which recurred as I finished the book – Elm Grove was brought about directly by the Lord, in a way quite unique…
I took a very quick look this morning at the newsletter links you sent, and found it amazingly encouraging – you’re doing wonderful things with young people, but with others too (the people you brought out from Gaza). The Winter 2025 letter was the one I opened. When I have more time, I shall go through various letters to be encouraged more! Thank you so much.
With that I think I’ve exhausted my ‘thoughts’ for the present. I take you all to prayer with the Lord, Who is more accessible when we see all He is doing behind the scenes, and that is partly because of your fidelity to His call.
May He bless you both, and all with you, in the way He knows is best for you.’
With my loving prayers,
Sr. Mary Magdalen o.c.d.
For those who might be interested in our book these are the details – The Elm Grove Story – a mystical journey ISBN 978-1-922722-55-3 and is available through major booksellers – Angus & Robertson, Booktopia, eBay Australia, Amazon, eden.co.uk.