Community
Carer appreciation day in the park
Sixty households, a barbecue, and the annual reminder that carers do this alongside their own jobs, families and lives.
What the numbers show
Measured at six and twelve months, because that is when you find out whether it held. Every figure on this page is invented for a demonstration site — the format is what is real.
Last financial year
2,400 people, four program areas
The number we watch hardest is not how many people we saw. It is how many were still doing well a year later.
86%
Left youth accommodation into stable housing
9 in 10
Preservation families who still had their children at home a year on
94%
Home care clients still living independently after a year
71%
Care leavers in work, study or training at 21
Youth & OOHC
Placements that held
78% of placements were still in place at twelve months. The 22% that were not are the ones we review hardest — most broke down in the first six weeks, which tells us the matching, not the carer, was the problem.
Disability & NDIS
Plans actually used
Participants used 81% of their plan budget, against a sector pattern of significant underspend. Unused budget is not a saving — it is support that never turned up.
Aged & community care
Fewer avoidable admissions
Hospital admissions among home care clients fell 18% after we added a weekly check-in for people living alone. It is a small intervention with an unreasonable return.
What did not work
The part most annual reports leave out
An impact page that only contains good numbers is marketing. These are the three things we got wrong last year, and what we changed.
Our intake line was too slow
Average time to a first human response was six days against a two-day commitment. We moved two staff to intake and published the number here so it stays uncomfortable.
Carers felt unsupported after hours
In the carer survey, 41% said they could not reach anyone who knew their placement at night. There is now a named on-call worker per household rather than a general line.
Two programs, two assessments
People in more than one program were still being assessed twice. Fixing that is what the single client record was for, and it took a year longer than we said it would.
Where the money goes
84 cents in every donated dollar reaches a person
Government funding covers the program. Donations cover what the funding agreement will not.
Direct support · 84c
The things no line item covers
- Brokerage: identity documents, bond, whitegoods, a rental arrears plan
- Caseworker time in the weeks 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 overheads we will defend
- Clinical supervision and training, which is not optional in this work
- Safeguarding, clearances and the audit trail four regulators expect
- Systems that keep one client record instead of four
- Fundraising costs, kept deliberately small
Recently
What we have been doing
Programs
Drop-in hubs open in two more suburbs
Walk in, eat, wash and talk to someone. No appointment, no referral, no front desk asking what this is regarding.
Employment
Fourteen tickets, eleven jobs
Our skills program put fourteen young people through accredited training. Eleven were in paid work within six weeks; we are still working with the other three.
Practice
Restoration is not a failure of care
Eleven children went home to parents last year. What our practice team learned about doing that safely, and slowly.
Aged care
A weekly phone call, an 18% fall in admissions
The cheapest thing we did all year, and the one with the clearest result.
Policy
Care leavers should not lose support at 18
What our submission said about extending support to 21, and why the cost argument runs the wrong way.
Illustrative stories, written for this demonstration site. None describes a real person or event.
What we argue for
What we argue for, and where
We see the same problems arrive from four directions, which puts us in a position to say something useful about them.
- Support to 21
- Care does not end because a birthday arrives. Extending support to 21 costs less than the homelessness it prevents.
- One assessment, many programs
- Funders each require their own assessment of the same family. It is a tax paid in people's time.
- Kin first, properly resourced
- Kinship carers take on the most and receive the least support of any placement type.