Offer support — ACME Community Services

Become a carer

The most useful thing anyone can offer us is a spare room

Sixty households are authorised with us today, and we need more — particularly for teenagers, sibling groups and children with disability, who wait longest.

You do not need to own your home, be married, be under 50, or have raised children before. You do need patience, a spare room, and a tolerance for paperwork we will help you through.

Step 1 — Enquiry. A phone call and an information session. No commitment, and plenty of people decide it is not for them here, which is fine.

Step 2 — Assessment. Home visits, referees, and clearances for every adult in the household. Thorough because it has to be. Usually three to four months.

Step 3 — Authorisation. A panel decision, then training before any child is placed with you.

Step 4 — Support. A named on-call worker who knows your placement, respite, a carer allowance, and an annual review.

Talk to the carer team What is involved

A child with carers and a worker at home

60authorised carer households,
and room for more

Donate

What a donation actually buys

Here is the shopping list, because it is more persuasive than an appeal letter.

$45 — a replacement identity document. Without one there is no bank account, no lease and no job, so this is where a lot of cases actually start.

$90 — a month of fares. Missing appointments is rarely about willingness; it is usually about the fare.

$280 — the contents of an empty flat: bedding, a kettle, plates, and pots that will outlast the tenancy.

$650 — the tickets and steel-caps that turn a willing eighteen-year-old into someone a site supervisor can legally put to work.

$2,000 — bond and first fortnight on a lease that no agent would have approved without us standing behind it.

ACME Community Services Ltd is a fictional organisation used to demonstrate the BPA platform. No donation made here is real and no payment is taken.

Make a donation

Demo only — no payment taken

In a live site your existing payment provider drops in here, so receipting, recurring giving and donor records keep working exactly as they do today.

Talk to our fundraising team

Nothing is charged. This is a demonstration site for a fictional organisation, so the donation panel is deliberately inert.

Where it goes

Overheads are a means, not a mission

We publish the split every year, and we would rather explain it than round it off.

Direct support · 84c

Straight to a person

Brokerage a funding agreement will not cover
Caseworker time after a program formally ends
Cultural activities designed with families and Elders
Transport, because getting there is half the barrier

Running the place · 16c

The rest

Supervision and training for frontline staff
Safeguarding, clearances and the audit trail
Systems that keep one client record instead of four
Fundraising costs, kept deliberately small

Indicative figures. ACME Community Services is fictional; these numbers illustrate the format of a real annual disclosure.

Volunteer

Jobs that genuinely need doing

All volunteer roles require a working with children check. We pay for it.

Driving

Appointments, court, contact visits, the tip run when someone moves into a first flat. The single most requested thing across every program.

Tutoring and homework help

Weeknight sessions at our drop-in hubs. Maths and English mostly, patience always.

Carer support line

Experienced carers taking calls from newer ones. Nobody explains a first placement better than someone who has had one.

Social visiting

An hour a week with an older person who lives alone. It is also our single best early warning that something has changed.

Starter packs

Assembling the linen, kitchen and bathroom boxes that go into a first tenancy. Good for workplace groups.

Skills you already have

Bookkeeping, trades, HR, a truck. Tell us what you do and we will tell you honestly whether we can use it.

One employer holding a job open does more than a year of our fundraising.

Employers and partners

Your hiring budget is worth more than your donations budget

A start date, a supervisor briefed on what they are taking on, and room for a rough first month. We stay alongside both sides while it settles.

After that: skills you would normally bill for, warehouse space, a bulk order of the dull essentials, and money — which we spend on the essentials rather than on advertising that we need them.

Talk to our partnerships team

Other ways that genuinely help

Container deposits nominated to us, a workplace giving program, or leaving a gift in your will. All quiet, all useful.

Ask us how

Ways to offer support