Consultations were called upon from the Department of Social Services for proposed reforms to supports and services for families, children and young people.
PLACE has responded by submission with these top recommendations:
1. Build on the strengths of existing programs by running a collaborative rather than competitive commissioning process, tailoring approaches to different places and leveraging existing, established relationships between service providers and communities.
2. Ensure funding to support place-based community leadership. This recognises that sustained outcomes will only be achieved with the ongoing engagement of community at the centre of local service design, commissioning and delivery.
3. Ensure that program performance and learning frameworks value the role of community within design, delivery and commissioning.
4. Use relational approaches – including collaborative commissioning, relational contracting and shared decision-making – to deliver value for the communities in most need. This can be achieved by drawing on organisations with existing capability and actively learning to build national capability over time.
5. Extending the implementation timeframe by 6-12 months to enable investment in building DSS’s core function and capability to act as system steward, to work with commissioning bodies, and to support relational contracting.