Transcript:
Hello, it is my pleasure to provide another update from the Mambourin CEO, speaking to you from Wurundjeri Country.
You may know that besides my CEO role, I am the President of the Board of NDS, which represents organisations like Mambourin across the country. In March I went to Parliament House in Canberra on behalf of NDS and with Every Australian Counts. We asked every politician to #DefendOurNDIS – every good campaign has to have a hashtag nowadays!
We handed an open letter directly to leaders in Federal Parliament including Anthony Albanese who is our new Prime Minister, and Bill Shorten who has been announced as the Minister for the NDIS. We demanded that every politician ensure that we have a strong NDIS for all Australians, for all time, to support people with disability to live with dignity. We insisted the cuts to NDIS individual funding are unconscionable, and the pressure on support workers these cuts are creating is absolutely unacceptable.
Mambourin has a long association with Mr Shorten as our local member in Maribyrnong and I have already messaged him to congratulate him on his appointment and indicate that we are looking forward to working closely with him to ensure the NDIS is the best that it can possibly be, especially for the people who need it most.
Closer to home, I would like to acknowledge the incredible amount of hard work that everyone has done through the last two years of the pandemic, striving to ensure that everyone remained safe and well, and people who desperately needed our services got them as much as humanly possible.
The Mambourin staff, led by Vicki O’Neill our NDIS Manager and Mahal Lazaro our Hubs Manager who have coordinated our efforts including liaising with government departments and the mountain of reporting that we have had to do, our hubs and MBS managers, all the staff, everyone has done their bit. And then of course, there are our wonderful community members, and their families, who have assisted us with your understanding and your willingness to be flexible as we worked through the challenges together, and you have continued to support us throughout. Please accept my most heartfelt thank you.
Every cloud has a silver lining, as my mum loves to say, and out of the pandemic some wonderful new initiatives have flourished. Many people are exploring other support options including 1:1 support, which we are often delivering fully independently in the community, and sometimes in-home, and flexi choice activities.
Speaking of flexi choices, I am really pleased to say that the team is in the early stages of reintroducing supported holidays to existing customers. We are exploring a new out of hours gaming activity, and a partnership with an allied health provider which will make access to professionals like physios easier for our customers. Of course Zoom meetings are offered when customers are unable to attend in person such as when they are unwell, which has become routine in a such a very short space of time.
Please make every effort to stay safe and healthy as the flu season kicks in. Keep up all of the hygiene practices that we have learnt from the pandemic to keep yourself and those around you out of harm’s way.
Bye for now.
If you would like to contact Rohan Braddy, you can email him directly at: CEO@mambourin.org
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