“You can’t just come in like a fly and take-off”: An evaluation report on client and staff experiences of the delivery of CatholicCare NT’s Financial Wellbeing and Capability Program

“You can’t just come in like a fly and take-off”: An evaluation report on client and staff experiences of the delivery of CatholicCare NT’s Financial Wellbeing and Capability Program Report

• Author(s): Louth, J, Goodwin-Smith, I
• Published: 2018
• Publisher: Australian Centre for Community Services Research, Flinders University

Link to resource Report broken link

Abstract: The CatholicCare NT model involves teams comprised of financial counsellors and financial wellbeing and capability case managers, who operate from each of the three regional hubs (Darwin, Katherine and Tennant Creek). The approach is innovative in that the targeted clients are often subject to Income Management; a cohort who do not traditionally access financial counselling services. Moreover, the FWC teams travel to or are place-based in remote communities. The teams are domiciled in regional offices that are local to the communities which they serve. This allows them to develop enduring relationships with those communities over time, which would be hard to achieve using fly-in fly-out models of practice which extricate practitioners from communities and the lived context of their broader environs. Coupled with an emergency relief referral strategy, this immersive approach provides staff with an enhanced opportunity to identify and engage with clients on an ongoing basis. While ‘mainstream’ financial counselling and case management defines much of the work that takes place with metropolitan-based Darwin and Palmerston clients, the outreach teams’ work with remote and regional clients have to undertake the complex task of working across cultural and geographic space. This translates as a need to negotiate different economic worlds. Further, the increased financialisation of everyday life in remote communities heightens the requirement to develop and sustain an appropriate and culturally sensitive FWC model that is responsive to local challenges. This report evaluates and provides further research on such a model.

• Urls: https://www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=0c5becf8-5594-4475-94f8-4400f562fdf5&subId=671515
• Publisher Location: Adelaide