Welcome to 2025!
We hope you had a great time over the holidays. Over the break, many of our teams celebrated with their families, and many continued to support their participants across our communities.
With the year now well underway at Ability Options, I thought I would share some of what we have been up to and our plans as 2025 continues.
From November to Christmas Day in 2024, our Employment Services team ran an extra campaign to help more people across New South Wales find meaningful, lasting jobs.
Through our team’s efforts, we successfully supported 328 participants to secure jobs in a variety of industries, over that period – an amazing achievement. Having a job which is reliable and meaningful enables participants to contribute to and be included in their communities, it improves their self-esteem and of course it helps pay the bills.
I’m very proud of the participants who took a big step into employment and of our wonderful teams who supported them and who will continue that support in future weeks and months.
The ‘Jobs for Christmas’ campaign started in 2023 as an initiative to get people into work before the holiday season. You can read more about the campaign’s success here.
Looking forward to 2025, we are continuing along our road map to long-term sustainability and continuing to deliver high-quality services across our community. As Ability Options approaches its 50th birthday next year, we continue to lay the groundwork to ensure we can continue to meet our Mission – to support people who need assistance to achieve their aspirations and inclusion in the community – for another 50!
In line with our strategy, we’ll continue to focus on our three key strategic pillars: Putting People First, Simplifying and Stabilising, and Being Future Facing.
We will continue to build the great relationships we have with our participants and their families, with new participants and with partners and everyone who is part of the Ability Options community. As part of this, we have already hosted three family forums across our service footprint in FY25. These forums are an opportunity for our Executive team and Directors to meet with the wonderful families that we have the privilege of supporting, to hear feedback about the services we provide. We look forward to hosting more and meeting more of you as the year continues.
Since July, I have been delighted to spend time visiting participants and staff throughout New South Wales, as have our Board Directors. So far, I have been to 70 homes and sites across our network and plan to visit those I haven’t by June this year.
Lastly, we are extending our services. Ability Options is open to new participants for Supported Independent Living, Specialist Disability Accommodation, Coordination of Supports, Groups, Therapy, Employment including NDIS Employment and School Leaver Employment, Short term Accommodation, Counselling and Community Participation in most of our locations from Wollongong to Grafton. We are growing a new community participation offer in Port Macquarie too.
Services are also new to Ability Options in Forster, Tea Gardens and Hawks Nest. New houses are coming soon in the Newcastle area, including for groups of young adults who want to share with friends. We are also planning to offer Medium Term Accommodation on the Central Coast soon, especially for people in hospital who are waiting for their SIL home to be ready. If you’re interested in any of these please enquire here or give our friendly teams a call on 1300 422 454.
