Delivering on our purpose

Trudi Ray Deputy CEO

The COVID-19 pandemic has continued to highlight the long-standing inequities and the need for safe, secure, affordable, and appropriate housing throughout 2020-2021.

The impact reflects long-standing inequities in housing that the crisis has only exacerbated. Many Victorians previously unaffected by housing insecurity are now experiencing factors directly linked to housing stress.

Thankfully, the Victorian Government's range of policy and investment interventions during the year helped us and others meet much of the demand for emergency accommodation and support at the height of the pandemic.

To ensure we remained focused on keeping our clients and their needs at the core of what we do, we adopted a range of flexible processes to provide a hybrid of virtual and localised services and keep our doors open.

Although driven by necessity, we believe these new ways of working have provided valuable lessons and insights into our operations and how we can provide better, more diverse support and services.

The knowledge and experience gained from pivoting throughout the pandemic has further informed our operational support services strategic framework and helped identify and prioritise policy improvements and system enhancements, notably the roll-out of a new customer Relationship management system, connect, in late 2020.

This investment in technology has the added benefit of streamlining delegations and empowering our frontline staff.

Through connect, we can now collect critical data on program performance, enabling us to help determine efficient resource allocation and drive our future decision-making.

The quality and governance of our decision-making are more important than ever as we articulate and report best practice outcomes across 24 programs.

The newest addition to our suite of programs has been developing and delivering From Homelessness to a Home (H2H) in partnership with Mind Australia and specialist support agencies across the Loddon, Mallee, and Barwon regions.

During the height of the pandemic, the Victorian Government made a significant investment to provide a pathway for eligible people who were temporarily placed in emergency accommodation during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown to transition from emergency accommodation into more secure and affordable housing.

There are 14 consortiums established across the state, with housing and support organisations joining forces to deliver a tailored and responsive service based on individual needs. Our H2H is one of 14 government-funded programs to provide 1,845 households with access to stable medium and long term housing and support packages to people experiencing homelessness who are residing in emergency accommodation due to the pandemic. The program design recognises the importance of pairing housing with appropriate levels of support. Whilst the implementation further highlighted the lack of appropriate and affordable housing, the policy design and investment to bring together flexible support with appropriate housing is a philosophy and model that must be translated to the rest of the system.

One of our highlights of 2020-2021, was expanding our Specialist Disability Accommodation management and compliance capability and working with several partners to house people living with significant disabilities. We embarked on this expansion with the Board supporting the decision in May 2021.

Understanding the need for more housing that specifically addresses the needs of people with disabilities - including those with extreme functional impairment and high support needs - we increased our capacity to provide and manage Specialist Disability Accommodation (SDA). A specific and highly complex offering, we are proud to be able to provide specialist housing options for clients with disabilities.

In February, we embarked on a transformation journey with our customers at the core.

We are an organisation with a proud history; however as we move towards the future, we recognise what got us here won't get us to where we need to be.

Our transformation ensures we continue to check in to make sure we have clarity of strategy, that we complement other services in the system and be clear that our priorities are outcomes over ownership. We work towards ensuring that vulnerable Victorians will be supported by HHS and the broader service system.

Validation of our transformation aspirations and response to the pandemic came in October with the Human Services Standards accreditation mid-cycle review.

The independent auditor recommended us for a commendation, "acknowledging the unanimously positive statements and praise of clients and stakeholders alike in appreciation of HHS's abilities in meeting extreme service demands, in innovative and compassionate ways, throughout the past 19 months of the COVID-19 pandemic operations and evolving responses".

It is a privilege to work with our clients. A privilege that we don't take for granted.