Welcome to our first newsletter for 2020. Following is a summary of our key projects and observations for the sector across Housing, NDIS and strategic planning. If any of these stories resonate with your strategies for this year, and you would like to learn more about our services, don’t hesitate to get in touch. Also, please visit our website for more information about our team and services here:
Website: Social Scaffolding
LinkedIn: Social Scaffolding Regards Andrew Hamilton Director
STRATEGIC PLANNING
James and Andrew worked with The Hopkins Centre project of Child Health Disability that is focusing on an exciting combination of young people, nutrition, disability, mobility and early learning. The focus is to integrate a suite of complementary team research efforts across; allied health, nursing and midwifery, and basic science, to systematically re-shape existing project-focused community/industry partnerships into program level strategic long-term research platforms. This is a two year project funded by the Menzies Health Institute and Griffith University. We supported the project to develop a strategic plan, reporting framework and partnership methodology, that will then be used by the project manager to support the project rollout.
SDA HOUSING
There is a huge unmet need for specialist disability accommodation (SDA) in Australia. Over 6,000 people nationally and over 1,200 people in Queensland under the age of 65 are currently living in inappropriate accommodation in aged care facilities. (Source: Australian Institute of Health and Welfare) Shari and Andrew have been working with a prominent Queensland based organisation to help them unlock impact investment capital to deliver more specialist disability accommodation for their clients and other people with high care needs. Funding for this project is from the Impact Invest Australia (IIA) Impact Investment Ready Growth Grant. Few organisations and private developers in the market currently have the knowledge and experience of delivering not only appropriately designed accommodation but also Specialist Independent Living services (SIL) to people with a disability. Our client has a strong track record of supporting people in both areas as well as a waitlist of customers. If you are interested in providing finance for these specialist disability accommodation projects or other impact investment in your portfolio, please contact us. We are happy to provide more detail of the opportunities which deliver both a social and financial return.
HOUSING AND HOMELESS PROJECTS
Shari and Andrew have been working with Tier 1 and Tier 3 registered housing providers to navigate the Qld Department of Housing and Public Works Partnering for Growth process and the review of the 5 Year strategic plan submissions. We continue this process with the focus for both government and providers achieving the objectives of more social and affordable homes being built ASAP.
We are also engaging with the National Housing Finance and Investment Corporation (NHFIC) as part of this process. The announcement by the Qld Department of Housing and Public Works in the support of the Brisbane Alliance to End Homelessness (BAEH) is a very welcome outcome of working with Micah Projects for over 2 years since the evolution of the 500Lives 500Homes campaign into the BAEH. More resources for the Alliance and support for more homeless service providers to participate is well received and long overdue.
SOCIAL ENTERPRISE DEVELOPMENT
Angela and James are working with two international non-governmental organisations to help determine investment for impact. Working through a three stage process including activities such as stakeholder interviews, market scans, customer validation and opportunity prioritisation the aim is to determine feasibility for a new social enterprise. The proposed social enterprise, driven by a desire to remain relevant and improve sustainability could operate across Australia and the Asia Pacific.
The project has the potential to move into the implementation stage and demonstrates Social Scaffolding's capacity to support organisations in achieving strategic and operational goals.
BUILDING FINANCIAL RESILIENCE
CSIA and Social Scaffolding are delivering an exciting project across Queensland, as part of the Department of Social Service Jobs Market Fund Round 1. Social Scaffolding has been engaged to design and deliver seven workshops throughout the state. The Building Financial Resilience workshops focus on developing the financial capability of community organisations, as well as evolving a new form of collective investment capital for disability service providers. The workshops will be held in Townsville, Cairns, Rockhampton, Mackay, Toowoomba, Sunshine Coast and Brisbane. If you are a CEO, CFO, Board Member or Senior Management within a community organisation, and would like to unlock the untapped potential of your organisation through increasing financial capability and using alternative sources of capital, join us at one of the workshops. Click here to learn more and register for a workshop. In addition to the workshops, CSIA and Social Scaffolding will facilitate a collaboration of disability service providers to explore, design and structure a collective investment model. Finding alternative sources of capital will enable organisations to transform and grow to deliver innovative service delivery to meet the needs of people with disabilities.
NDIS REVIEW
With the launch of NDIS, the sector’s attention was on ‘NDIS readiness’ which focused on capability development to prepare service providers, to transition to a participant-led market and business models. Three years later, we have seen the evolution of service providers to accommodate this new market and witnessed mergers, closures and the entrance of new providers, all aiming to compete for a share of the $22 billion market.
To some certain extent, the dust has settled and now the imperative for service providers is to achieve sustainability by driving efficiency and achieve scale across the customer base. Given these imperatives, our client focus over the past 6 months has been working on process efficiency opportunities across the NDIS process (participant attraction through to invoicing) by identifying where value is created and lost through participant interactions, redesigning processes to maximise value creation and introducing low-cost technical solutions to automate activities. Examples of where we have helped clients achieve significant gains are in the participant attraction and onboarding activities, where we leveraged CRM automation functionality to reduce the effort involved in collecting participant data and arranging the first intake meeting, through to redesigning attendance tracking and invoicing activities by eliminating paper-based records and introducing streamlined attendance apps that integrate with fortnightly invoicing activities. A critical component in this work is to build a business case to demonstrate the cost of current and future processes and to clearly identify the benefits of introducing change into an organisation. Please make contact if you are interested in discussing the potential within your organisation.
