About Women's Healing Sanctuary
A place to pause, rest, and feel nurtured
Women’s Healing Sanctuary is a not-for-profit charity offering women a quiet, safe place to step away from the weight of loss, trauma, exhaustion, and overwhelm.
We are not a clinic, a refuge, or an emergency service. We are a private home set on six secluded acres of trees, gardens, and lawns in Port Stephens, New South Wales, around a two-hour drive from Sydney. It is a place where women can slow down, breathe, and prioritise themselves, often for the first time in a long while.
Our purpose
Many women carry a great deal, quietly, for a very long time. Grief, burnout, trauma, and the ordinary exhaustion of caring for everyone else can build slowly until rest no longer feels possible.
We exist to offer a different kind of space. One where rest is recognised as an essential part of recovery, and where women feel safe to set things down for a while, without pressure, expectation, or judgement.
We do not direct or define how healing should happen. Instead, we focus on creating the conditions where it can unfold naturally, through safety, calm and a nurturing environment, at each woman’s own pace.
Our mission
As a registered charity and deductible gift recipient, our mission is to provide a nurturing space where women can heal from the overwhelming experiences of loss and trauma, regardless of their circumstances.
Our mission comes to life through:
- Creating safe, trauma-informed environments where women can rest without pressure or expectation
- Offering experiences that prioritise calm, privacy, and emotional safety
- Supporting women to reconnect with themselves in their own time and in their own way
- Making rest and recovery more accessible through a balanced model of paid and subsidised stays
- Building trust with guests, supporters, and referral partners through consistency, compassion, and integrity
How the Sanctuary began
Women's Healing Sanctuary grew from lived experience.
A model built on women supporting women
Our co-founders, Sharalyn Drayton and Janine Hanna, each understood the value of stepping away during difficult seasons of their own lives. Sharalyn, a counsellor who has worked in mental health for two decades, knows firsthand the need for a safe place to retreat, including through her own grief following the loss of her eldest son. Janine, who spent years as an oncology and palliative care chaplain, found that returning regularly to a women’s retreat became an invaluable way to restore and replenish herself while supporting others through crisis.
The wish to offer other women that same space to rest and restore became the foundation of the Sanctuary.
Every stay at the Sanctuary helps make space for another woman.
Through our Angel Sponsorship Program, contributions from guests, donors, and supporters help fund stays for women who could not otherwise afford them. It is a gentle, practical way that one woman’s time at the Sanctuary can quietly help another.
This is at the heart of what we do. We hope to welcome any woman who might benefit, regardless of her capacity to pay.
Our impact
Since welcoming our first guest in April 2021, the Sanctuary has supported women one stay, one conversation, and one restful night at a time. As at 30 June 2026:
Guided by a dedicated board
Our board brings together experience across mental health, community services, finance, and not-for-profit governance. Alongside our co-founders, our directors share a commitment to ensuring every woman who needs the Sanctuary can experience it, no matter her circumstances or where she lives.
Read more about the people behind the Sanctuary
You are welcome here
If you would like to talk through anything first, you are welcome to contact our team. There is no pressure, only a gentle invitation to take the next step that feels right for you.
