10 years ago, on the 5th of October 2015, the world didn’t seem much different.
In other parts of the world, there was a “once in millennia” flooding in South Carolina, air strikes on civilian hospitals in Afghanistan, and Russia invaded another country’s air space (Turkey).
But the world for some of us was different. The NDIS had been legislated in 2013 and was rolling out across the state, completing in 2018 for Brisbane.
A few of you were able to use the Your Life, Your Choice funding for post-school provision, which was providing people with the first example of choice of provider that they had ever genuinely had. In 2015 it was limited to day service, but it was the start of the change.
I have worked for 39 years now supporting people with a multitude of disabilities and 10 years ago I was excited to see a future where people were not just sat in rooms or taken to parks to fill in days.
There was now an opportunity to skill build; to take over where school left off and create a space where people could learn the skills they needed to be adults and make some great friends along the way. I wanted a space where everyone mattered, everyone shone, and everyone knew how amazing they were.
We knew we could do things differently to other providers.
We support people to build skills and new experiences they actually need such as; public transport use, cooking, gardening, money handling - all things we need to develop to thrive in our communities.
I won't lie to you, supporting this ethos has been easier said than done.
It takes finding staff with passion, professional boundaries and availability, and then training these wonderful people. It takes navigating the constant changes and extreme admin burden of NDIS compliance. It takes being creative to find new ways to fund the innovation we need to stay at the forefront of quality support and not just provide basic care.
It also takes relentless dedication to our vision. Not just from me, but from every person in the business to keep driving this ship in the direction of high-quality supports, despite the strong head winds of life and economics.
Finally, it takes trust from the families and the people we support. It's not easy to sign up to a service and trust them to do the right thing.
The reality is, any provider can say they provide high quality supports, but what makes us different? And how would you know how we support people, without trial and error? Well, for us, there are a few things we will always do that conveys that we do things differently.
Firstly, we operate our head office out of our daily living skills hub, which is a small residential home in the suburb of Forest Lake. We believe you can only have truly tailored supports if you keep all group supports small, so we are capped at ten people per day.
We will never have a sign on the door or uniforms - we believe the people we support are no different to us and deserve to feel that way. They also deserve to attend a service based in the heart of their community.
We will always use our photos in our marketing - no stock photos here! The photos we take here are of everyone's real time effort, commitment and engagement in tasks, and it's important validation for the people in the photos to see their progress and you can too.
We will always have the leadership team based on site. We believe our leaders need to be accessible and able to knowledge share, be ready to lead by example, and be able to see what's going on in the heart of the company.
These are just some small signs that point to our values, because if there's one thing this industry has taught us, it's that the small, daily improvements is what counts.
So that's what we continue to do.
The world did change that day on October 5th, 2015. For the three people we supported that day to the 40+ we support now. It changed for the two staff that day and it changed for the 70+ now, and it certainly changed life for me.
I'm incredibly thankful for every one of you who have been a part of the Your Choice Supports journey so far, and, small daily improvement by small daily improvement, I look forward to everything we can achieve in future.
Michelle Davies-Clark | Director
