A Supported Living Fund is simple and a new idea for NSW. It provides support for families to plan so that men and women with disability can have a home of their own in a planned and timely fashion.
It is a sensible idea that supports and rewards initiative, taking families from a position of dependence, stress and crisis, to a position in which they are empowered to plan and to take the lead. The reward will come in the form of resources that provide for paid support to compliment informal support provided by family and friends. And what better way to ensure that the resources really make a difference than to offer families the opportunity to direct their own support, either through an existing service, by use of a financial intermediary or by receiving a direct payment to pay for whatever support is required.
A Supported Living Fund challenges the perversities of our current system; whilst talking of prevention and early intervention, the current system thwarts family initiative and rewards crisis and dependence. We all know that such crisis driven response is very costly – for people with disability, their families and ‘the system’.
A Support Living Fund challenges the NSW Government to be serious about moving from crisis intervention to prevention, from having sole responsibility for long term care and support to being a partner in care and support. It does this by encouraging and supporting family initiative while families still have the capacity to partner.
We want to see a Supported Living Fund as a centre piece of the second stage of Stronger Together and call on families and allies across the State to get behind the concept in the lead up to the NSW State election in March 2011.
Family Advocacy's full paper is attached here.
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