Note from Chair

As the Chair of Windermere, I always appreciate the opportunity to sit and reflect on the past 12 months in the preparation of the annual Impact Report. With the strong support of the Board and the Windermere leadership team there is always much to consider.

This year I was proud to see that we were once again called upon to support the statewide February 2024 catastrophic storm event and localised bushfires. With so much personal hardship and distress experience by so many people we all felt very honoured to again be able to manage the intake 1800 number, triage out and through to local communities and support target relief activities. As a Board we have also continued to invest our time and resources in the support of NDIS. We know that families have a range of difficulties in accessing services and that the system itself is under great pressure. As an organisation we feel the financial impacts of these pressures but we are proud to continue in this space supporting our community. This year we also resettled into our newly refurbished building. It was such an honour to have Liana Buchanan, Principal Commissioner for Children and Young People officiate our opening event and to have so many of those who have and continue to support our work in attendance.

I hope that you enjoy reviewing our 2023/24 Impact Report and as I do every year I would like to thank each and every one of our very committed Board and Advisory Committee members for volunteering their time to Windermere. In closing I would also like to acknowledge Alane Fineman for her five year tenure that concluded in November 2023 and all the employees at Windermere for their passion and commitment to improving the lives of those we serve.

Read more


Gary Castricum
Chair

Note from CEO

On behalf of everybody at Windermere I hope that you enjoy our 2023/24 Impact Report. As representation of our past 12 months I am confident you will very much enjoy reading of the great work undertaken with our consumers and the ambition of our teams to keep improving our practice and our ways of working. This year we worked with nearly 25,500 consumers.

With this number of consumers being supported across our many services our aim remains very focused on providing them with a service to meet their goals and their desired outcomes. At the core of our work is our Practitioner Coaching Framework designed to build the capability and skills of those we work with, and the starting point is always to understand their needs. Our Framework is based on an evidence informed approach including many data points that assists us in understanding and driving our points of impact. This year we have also commenced a significant journey is seeking to develop and invest in our digital ambitions across the whole organisation. With an investment strategy approved at the June 2024 meeting we are all very excited about bringing new learning, insight and expanding a data culture. Already throughout 2023/24 we have commenced a number of projects to streamline some existing systems, explore future operational enhancements and have invested significant time in the early development of a future Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.

Over my 11 years of being here at Windermere there has always been one common thread and that is committed, passionate and ambitious staff. Windermere recognises the importance of our people, and our work continues to focus on building a place where people can be their best for those we serve, as we know every individual at Windermere is a contributor to our success. I thank everybody for their work and commitment to our communities.

Read more


Dr Lynette Buoy
Chief Executive Officer

Our Impact

In the 2023-24 financial year we provided services that supported

25,498

children, families and individuals in the areas of:


Family wellbeing

Crisis, assault and trauma

Disaster recovery

Early childhood development, education and support

Community strengthening

What our community
is saying about us

Strategic Plan 2023-2026

Our strategic plan is a crucial document that both supports our purpose and vision and also guides our overall strategic direction and operational priorities. During 2023 we concluded our 2020-23 plan and launched our new 2023-26 plan. The plan focuses on adopting evidence informed approach to guide the impact we have on our consumers, our financial stewardship, our people & our workplace and our processes, under the themes of:

  • Theme 1: Improve Lives
  • Theme 2: Share our story
  • Theme 3: Drive system capability
  • Theme 4: Enhance organisational resilience

The Strategic Plan sets a framework for us to focus our energies and resources and work toward outcomes and common goals and has the themes of:

During the year we concluded our current strategic plan and
began developing and launching our new 2023-2026 strategic plan.

Improve Lives

The consumer’s voice & lived
experience is present in all that we do

Using the Theory of Change to achieve better outcomes

A Theory of Change (ToC) is a comprehensive description of how and why a desired change is expected to happen in a particular context. It enables us to clearly identify and measure outcomes for those we work with. It also allows for evidence collected by practitioners working directly with families, and families themselves, to guide key program decisions, processes and practices and improve the likelihood of the program achieving success. During the year we worked with our redress, victims of crime, counselling and early intervention and therapy service teams to develop their specific ToC. This will allow us more ways to enhance our accountability and transparency in our practices while also identifying more opportunities for improvement in the future.

Empowering those
we work with


Our Practitioner Coaching Framework (PCF) enables the individuals and families we support to achieve their goals and lead more independent lives. By building their capacity to problem-solve and navigate everyday challenges, our families are better equipped to break negative cycles and develop the skills needed to overcome future obstacles.

CASE STUDY

Strengthening families through
the Practitioner Coaching Framework

Integrated Family Services Practitioner Dean Dell recognised the potential benefits that Windermere’s Practitioner Coaching Framework (PCF) could bring to families when he joined the Windermere team. “I thought it was such an innovative way to work with families and I wanted to be part of that,” says Dean.

The PCF is based on a coaching model which encourages families to build and develop their inner strengths, skills and confidence to problem-solve and meet challenges in their lives.

Dean saw the PCF as an important and valuable way of delivering services to individuals and families as it helps to overcome limitations of traditional case management.

“PCF allows us to create sustainable change for those we support by building individuals capacity and empowering their own efforts rather than doing things for them,” he says.

Dean draws on his expertise to help families safely navigate the complexities of family violence, address a range of challenges across mental health, parenting and disabilities and work toward positive outcomes.

While working with families to address these complex needs in their referral to ensure their stability and development, the PCF also allows Dean to work on issues that families identify as relevant and important to them.

“These could be issues that we may not have identified but they have. We work with them on what matters to them and how they want to achieve that. It creates a very positive engagement from the start when we can ask them what they want to work on, outside of identified needs,” adds Dean.

Supporting vulnerable families is not without challenges and Dean credits a supportive work culture that helps him meet the demands of his role.

“I feel valued and respected. The support from my manager and team leaders are so genuine and always available. They help me be the best I can be,” he says.

Read more

Delivering timely responses to support
disaster impacted residents

During the year, we strengthened our role as the statewide triage and assessment service drawing on our surge capacity in response to the January and February 2024 disaster events. We rapidly mounted a seven days per week, 12 hours per day response to support over 5,000 impacted residents.

The timely delivery of responses ensured impacted residents had appropriate information and access to grants and interim support while a recovery case worker was assigned to them.
We also prioritised maintaining consistency in service quality for our consumers by effectively onboarding new staff, establishing clear program systems and procedures, and providing ongoing coaching and development. This approach was essential to manage the program's scale as well as respond to uncertain demands.

Throughout the year, we maintained positive working relationships with Emergency Recovery Victoria and other community stakeholders sharing our capabilities and learning together to support recovery program planning.

Supporting stability and sustainable housing

Our Homelessness Support Services team continued working with vulnerable families and individuals, building their capacity and supporting them on their journey to secure sustainable housing resulted in lasting positive impacts on their lives. A key highlight of the year was our cross collaborative work with the Family Violence sector to achieve the best outcomes and support for our shared consumers.

To enhance our service delivery and better support vulnerable individuals and families, we further strengthened our engagement with strategic partners in the homelessness sector.

Throughout the year, our collaborative approach to work continued to strengthen our ability to deliver positive experiences for our consumers.

Supporting our NDIS community

During the year we provided a range of NDIS and early childhood early intervention supports. This included Support Coordination, Plan Management and a breadth of therapy services for both adults and children.

To ensure our consumers can continue to access high quality services from a registered NDIS service provider, we underwent our second external audit from 6-8 May, to renew our certification with the NDIS Commission. Auditors from HDAA, an independent auditing agency evaluated our compliance and quality against the NDIS Practice Standards. While we succeeded in meeting the quality and safeguards requirements, the auditors also provided highly positive feedback acknowledging Windermere committment as an NDIS organisation.

During the year we also worked to support our teams to become more data driven in our decision making. Steps taken to refine our internal processes to ensure more clarity in our internal reporting have also enabled us to better support our consumers.

CASE STUDY

How Support Coordination helps Michael live a full life

Michael, who suffered a brain injury, receives support coordination from Suzanne at Windermere. Suzanne helps with his NDIS paperwork, ensuring he gets the necessary services and equipment like dynamic wheelchair seating and specialized bed railings to improve his daily life.

She also connects him with essential therapies and facilitates his participation in community activities such as basketball and weightlifting. Michael has regained independence and enjoys gardening, contributing to his overall well-being.

Michael's mother, Kristina, values Suzanne’s role, as it relieves her burden and provides Michael with meaningful support.

Through personalized assistance, Michael leads a fuller, more empowered life.

“Michael has advanced in leaps and bounds in the last couple of years, and that has a lot to do with Windermere.”

Read more

Supporting the Cranbourne,
Clyde and Clyde North communities

During 2023/24:

Windermere is the Communities for Children (CfC) Facilitating Partner for Cranbourne. We work together with our Community Partners (CPs) to actively support children and their families in the wider Cranbourne, Clyde and Clyde North areas.

In March 2024 we initiated an Expression of Interest process to seek applications from our existing Community Partners to deliver no-cost, inclusive and accessible activities in the wider CfC Cranbourne areas that lead to positive outcomes for children and their families. Across 2024 to 2026, CfC Cranbourne will be supporting the following organisations and their activities:

  • Anglicare Victoria
    • Baby Makes 3 - Parenting Programs: Tuning into Kids, Tuning into Teens, Circle of Security and Parents Building Solutions
  • Play Matters Australia
    • Sing&Grow: music-based playgroups 
  • Uniting Victoria Tasmania
    • School Attendance Support Program (SASP) 
    • Building Resilience: community events
  • VACCA
    • Koorie Kids Homework Club Cranbourne
  • Wellsprings for Women
    • Parent-Child Mother Goose: playgroups with rhymes, songs and stories
    • Abecedarian Approach Australia (3a): early years program

In March we were also delighted to support Cranbourne East Primary School to present a free community event on “Supporting Resilience in Children" with two of Australia’s most highly regarded children's psychologists, Dr Michael Carr-Gregg & Dr Justin Coulson. The aim of the evening was to share strategies with parents and carers who were wanting to support their children's mental health and wellbeing in the home.

Enhancing positive outcomes for consumers

Our family services practitioners work with vulnerable families providing parenting supports to build capacity, ensuring children are safe and helping them achieve their goals.

In 2023-24, the Family Preservation and Reunification Response (FPRR) program was fully implemented to support families in the Cardinia, Casey and Dandenong regions.

Together with the Department of Families Fairness and Housing and Child Protection Navigators, we were pleased to receive the opportunity to deliver impactful outcomes for our consumers together with Uniting and their Finding Solutions Plus (FS+) program.

Through clear measurements obtained from the Parenting Research Innovative Social Evaluation (PRISE) data collection system, as well as anecdotal data, it was pleasing to demonstrated that families achieved significant outcomes through the FPRR program.

To further elevate our Integrated Family Services and in turn enrich supports to families, 80% of our team trained in Triple P (Positive Parenting Program) an evidenced based accredited program, while 20% trained in the extension programs. Across the next 12-24 month we look forward to implementing our learnings as we provide more targeted parenting activity.

Strengthening our capability to support vulnerable families

Our family violence services supported and empowered individuals and families experiencing family violence, helping them achieve positive outcomes while ensuring their safety.

In 2023-24, we improved our systems of support by successfully implementing the Family Violence Crisis Response Model in our practice.

This included ensuring victim survivors in crisis received immediate support and emergency accommodation. The next stage of reflecting, reviewing and refining processes also commenced.

Our position as a touchpoint for Family Violence Flexible Support Packages also enabled us to ensure victim survivors gained access to a range of supports such as housing stability, counselling, education and other practical needs. With a view to further enhance the quality of service we deliver to our consumers, we commenced a Practice Improvement Team (PIT) and Learning Circles for greater collaboration and continuous learning as we implement our Practitioner Coaching Framework. We also commenced evaluating and enhancing our practices, based on real-time data and feedback, ensuring that the services provided are more effective and aligned with the needs of our consumers.

Supporting recovery from sexual assault

Our specialist counselling team provides trauma-informed, confidential counselling to support Victim Survivors to manage and recover from trauma or difficulties following sexual assault, sexual violence and family violence.

During the year we focused on optimising our referrals and intake processes to better meet the needs of the individuals and families we work with. This included minimising the amount of information our consumers are required to provide at intake, so they only communicate certain details of their stories once.

We also successfully applied to the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing (DFFH) to fund an additional full time counselling role. This additional practitioner has allowed us to address our waitlist more effectively and efficiently, enabling us to be more responsive to those we support.

Maintaining quality standards

In November 2023, we were proud to achieve sixth round accreditation against the QIC Health and Community Services Standards (QIC Standards) and the Human Services Standards (superseded by the Social Services Standards effective 1 July 2024). Consumers, employees, partners and funders provided feedback that demonstrated Windermere’s capability in consumer and community engagement, diversity and cultural safety, sound governance and leadership, and quality service provision.

We were delighted to also achieve second round accreditation against the NDIS Quality and Safeguarding Practice Standards. See our NDIS section for further details.

At Windermere, in line with the Child Safe Standards, we seek to empower the voice of children and young people. As part of improving the ways in which children can tell us about their experiences, we introduced an accessible feedback system to enable children and young people to express their views and feelings. This included a new poster that links to a pictorial web-based feedback form via a QR code.

In 2023, we commenced work on creating a systematic, centralised consumer consultation system that will guide the implementation of consume consultations each year. This will include seeking the views of children and young people and consumers with diverse identities, cultures and backgrounds.

Share our story

Through evidence impact we promote our brand, advance targeted partnerships, strengthen connection with consumers and employers.

Marketing: Boosting Awareness & Improving Experience

In the year 2023-24, we launched the NDIS Hume Merri-bek Awareness Campaign. The primary goal of the campaign was to grow awareness in the region of how we can support NDIS participants by taking away the stress of their NDIS admin through our Plan Management service. We also commenced our project to embed the voice of our consumer in our work through our Consumer Consultation Process, led by our newly appointed Consumer Experience Project Lead.

Through our efforts to improve consumer and employee experience during the year, we achieved significant milestones. They include:

  • Incorporating feedback gained through the Plan Management Feedback Project into consumer communications.
  • Producing Easy English brochures for NDIS services to improve accessibility of information.
  • Updating all brochures to be more inclusive and accessible through imagery, content, inclusion flags and QR codes.
  • Optimising communication and advertising based on test results and insights.
  • Achieved over 95 percent open rate for five editions of our internal staff newsletter the Windermere Wrap.

Fundraising to improve the lives of our consumers

The Winter Tax Appeal and Christmas Appeals once again proved to be important initiatives for our organisation. Through authentic and compelling consumer stories to emphasise the importance and need of donor support, they served as opportunities to attract new donors, retain existing donors and reignite the support of lapsed donors.

Through our tax appeal we raised a total of $93,075 from 51 donors, surpassing our overall objectives of raising $30,000 in revenue and maintaining the number of donors at 47.

Our annual Christmas appeal Merry Mission also supported families in need through its two components Gift in Kind Appeal and the Christmas Cash Appeal.

We extend our gratitude to our valued donors including the Andrews Foundation for their generosity and helping us improve the lives of our consumers.

Support for families in need over Christmas

Celebrating and sharing success in Family Day Care

At the end of 2023 Windermere Family Day Care (FDC) was honoured to be recognised as one of four National Finalists from over 150 services at the Excellence in Family Day Care Awards 2023 from Family Day Care Australia. This was a result of being successful in winning the Victoria/Tasmania award category.

The Family Day Care Australia Awards celebrate excellence in early childhood education and care, acknowledging the incredible contributions of educators, services, and coordinators across the country. We believe that Windermere's commitment to providing a nurturing and enriching environment for children made us a strong contender for this award. This achievement would not have been possible without the invaluable support of our community and we are incredibly grateful for this acknowledgement and recognition by our sector.

We were also very proud that one of educators, Jo Pierce, was also honoured as the Regional Educator Winner in the Family Day Care Australia Awards 2023.

During the year we also worked to further strengthen our connections and partnerships to enhance outcome for our families and educators. To better support the orientation of our new educators, we increased the involvement of our Educator Program Coordinators in the recruitment and onboarding process. We also held an annual educators conference and established working relationships with two other major Family Day Care providers based in interstate locations.

CASE STUDY

How educator Jo creates a place of belonging
in her Family Day Care

In September 2023, Family Day Care educator Jo Pierce’s passion and dedication were recognised by the Family Day Care Excellence Awards which named her the Regional Educator Winner for the Mornington Peninsula & Bass Coast region.

Jo is registered as a Family Day Care educator with Windermere and believes the personalised nature of home-based care provides the best outcomes for children.

“Every child can feel seen and valued and they have a place where they can belong,” she says.

Personalised care and attention are very much at the heart of Family Day Care which maintains a limit of seven children up to age 12 with no more than four preschool children in care.

Jo credits her success to the strong bonds she has developed with families and children.

“We have become like a little family. I know them so well I can let parents know if I notice a difference in their behaviours and they are not themselves.”

The children love going to Jo’s and parents often share how eager their children are to return to the family day care after the weekend.

Choosing Windermere as a registered Family Day Care provider Jo also appreciates the support she receives from Windermere to run her Family Day Care seamlessly.

“I feel very supported. I know that I can reach out for help with any admin questions, there’s always someone to give me advice,”

This support from Windermere also helps maintain the relationships with families that she cherishes so much.

“Not only do I have the confidence to tell families to reach out to Windermere with any questions, I also appreciate that they handle all the financial aspects. That played a big role in my decision to choose Windermere,” she says.

Read more

Drive system capability

We embrace technology, it’s potential & ability to improve everyone’s experience, inform decision making & increase value.

Building our IT to support a stronger organisation

We continue to take a strategic and proactive approach to IT and data security. During the year we developed a cyber risk register and rolled out a Security Awareness Training and testing program to all staff. The training is designed to equip staff to recognise cyber security threats such as ransomware and phishing attacks and enable them to take appropriate action should an event occur. This is complimented by a quarterly testing campaign to monitor the effectiveness of the training and inform additional high risk areas requiring remediation.

We also introduced an IT helpdesk ticketing system in order to be better enhance and streamline helpdesk requests and responses and provide metrics to measure the performance of the helpdesk function.

Implementing our CRM
for better consumer experiences


With the right systems we can better support our consumers. During the year we continued with preparations to roll out and integrate a comprehensive Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to ensure we can provide more impactful and tailored services for our consumers.

Strengthening expansion and
support for victims of crime

During the year, our Victims Assistance Program (VAP) successfully expanded into the Western and Eastern metropolitan regions of Melbourne. In our two new regions, we supported vulnerable individuals to transition smoothly into our program to ensure continuity of services.

To support the needs of a growing consumer base, we also established operational service sites in these new regions to accommodate our new teams, and a hub to proactively engage with local stakeholders.

Across the four VAP regions where we operate, we implemented a Victim Response Unit to establish a centralised approach to intake. The Victim Response Unit enable rapid responses to urgent needs while victim survivors are being allocated to a case worker. This approach supports a consistent approach to keeping our consumer safe. Learnings and improvements continue to be applied to the new model in line with staff and consumer feedback.

Delete this 

We know that offering a more inclusive service allows us to cater for more diverse needs and also fosters a greater sense of belonging and innovation within our workforce, this in turn provides even more benefits to our consumers.

This year we continued to focus on the implementation of our Welcoming & Inclusion Strategy and Action Plan and have so far completed 46 of the 53 actions.

These actions contribute to our aspiration of becoming a truly diverse and inclusive organisation by ensuring culturally safe environments for both consumers and employees. 

The Rainbow Tick national standards provide a framework for us to become a culturally safe place for our LGBTIQ+ community. During the year we worked through the majority of the steps to achieve accreditation, with just one corrective action now outstanding. 

Eighty per cent of our staff have now completed LGBTIQ+ Inclusion Training with ACON Health and 97% have completed Managing Unconscious Bias Training.

We also worked with stakeholders to draft a Reflection Reconciliation Action Plan (RRAP). This included partnering with local Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander artists to create artwork for the document. When complete the RRAP will enable us to take meaningful action to advance reconciliation.

We also collaborated with community members, local artists and allies across our local area to source culturally significant artwork to display at our Narre Warren Office. This included art by people with disability, the LGBTQI+ community and those with indigenous and Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) backgrounds. A publicly available yarning space and reflection room was also created at our Narre Warren office.

We were delighted to partner with the Centre for Multicultural Youth who provided Culturally Responsive Youth Practice Training to our staff and were also special guests at a staff workshop.

A new disability icon that can be used to represent inclusion was also developed. Trademarking for the icon is currently underway.

 

 

Offering hire spaces for the community - delete this

Windermere is proud to manage the venue hire space at Toomah Community Centre, Pakenham in partnership with Cardinia Council. The Centre offers competitively priced spaces for meetings, functions and consulting suites as well as an on-site Café. Discounts are provided to community groups and not-for-profits.

During part of the year, we were also delighted to share some of our office space with The Orange Door, which provides support for people experiencing family violence. Toomah was also temporarily the site of our head office while our Narre Warren office was being refurbished.

With the removal of COVID-19 restrictions, we have been delighted to see interest in venue hire also reviving. This means we have now been able to meet the venue hire needs for an increasing range of different parties, including community groups, schools, training organisations and businesses.

Grateful thanks - delete this

Thank you to each and every one of you who have supported our events for over a decade. The funds raised have allowed us to continue our work to support and strengthen our community.

Enhance Organisational Resilience

We allocate resources with intent, anticipate the future and drive adaptability and capability.

Supporting Employee Experience
and building our capability

Across the year we continued to focus on enhancing and better understanding our employee experiences and our capability requirements. By supporting our employees we enable them to achieve better outcomes for our consumers.

It is pleasing that our check in mechanisms such as regular pulse surveys and our onboarding and offboarding surveys indicate a high degree of staff engagement.

During the year we used one of our two annual all staff forums (staff conferences) to explore our employee experience, through the eyes of ‘Windy’, an imagined Windermere colleague. This provided valuable insights into our capabilities and allowed us to better map our staff’s sense of belonging, connection and engagement.

A large body of work was spent mapping our Organisational Capability which encompasses all individual roles across Windermere. The Capability Framework has informed our understanding of our recruitment, performance, supervision and career requirements.

In turn, the understandings we have gained from our focus on employee experience and our capability framework has allowed us to be more informed in our decision making. The result has been a plan to develop a ’Windermere Academy’ to deliver tailored training and development support to our staff.

Enhancing our workspace for better outcomes

In August, a four-year journey of planning and a 12-month building program, our refurbished Narre Warren office re-opened. While Narre Warren was undergoing this extensive upgrade, we had been ensuring continuity of services via a combination of accommodation options, including substantially utilizing our Pakenham based office at Toomah Community Centre.

On 12 October the Narre Warren office was officially inaugurated by Liana Buchanan, Principal Commissioner for Children and Young People in the presence of the Windermere Chair, CEO and board members, supporters, friends and staff.

The building has been repurposed to create a purpose-built facility to better meet the needs of our consumers and staff.

It provides collaborative meeting and workspaces, a reception area that ensures safety and privacy and multipurpose consultation rooms with an adjoining children’s play and sensory area.

It also includes providing spaces to better cater to our hybrid way of working, the utilisation of various technologies to facilitate meetings, booking workspaces and lockers areas.

Inclusion matters

We know that offering a more inclusive service allows us to respond to the diverse needs across our many communities and foster a greater sense of belonging and innovation within our workforce.

This year we continued to focus on the implementation of our Welcoming & Inclusion Strategy and Action Plan and have so far completed 46 of the 53 actions.

These actions contribute to our aspiration of becoming a truly diverse and inclusive organisation by ensuring culturally safe environments for both consumers and employees.

The Rainbow Tick national standards provide a framework for us to become a culturally safe place for our LGBTIQ+ community. During the year we worked through the majority of the steps to achieve accreditation, with just one corrective action now outstanding.

Eighty per cent of our staff have now completed LGBTIQ+ Inclusion Training with ACON Health and 97% have completed Managing Unconscious Bias Training.

We also worked with stakeholders to draft a Reflection Reconciliation Action Plan (RRAP). This included partnering with local Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander artists to create artwork for the document. When complete the RRAP will enable us to take meaningful action to advance reconciliation.

We also collaborated with community members, local artists and allies across our local area to source culturally significant artwork to display at our Narre Warren Office. This included art by people with disability, the LGBTQI+ community and those with indigenous and Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) backgrounds. A publicly available yarning space and reflection room was also created at our Narre Warren office.

We were delighted to partner with the Centre for Multicultural Youth who provided Culturally Responsive Youth Practice Training to our staff and were also special guests at a staff workshop.

A new disability icon that can be used to represent inclusion was also developed. Trademarking for the icon is currently underway.

Finance – facilitating organisational changes and partnerships to increase understanding

During the year, our finance team including payroll worked closely with our HR Software solution (ConnX) for the smooth transition from Collective Agreement to Industry Awards.

We significantly enhanced our collaboration across the organisation providing insights and analytical perspectives to key stakeholders in particular Fee For Services. This served to better support their understanding of Windermere’s financial sustainability and enabled managers and team leaders to make more informed decisions and align their efforts more closely with the organisational goals.

We also worked to improve consumer experience by supporting the timely delivery of essential supports and urgent needs of family violence and homelessness consumers. We consistently collaborated with relevant services to ensure same-day payments for families and individuals.

In response to the January 2024 storm event and February 2024 bushfire and storm events we developed and administered a practical rostering system for our Recovery Support team. This system enabled our Recovery Support teams to efficiently organise their supports and deliver prompt and effective responses to consumers in need.

Early Learning Centre

At the end of 2023, we made the difficult decision to close our Frankston based early learning centre adjacent Monash University Peninsula campus. After 10 years we were very sad to conclude our time however were confident that Monash University would be able to identify a larger provider able to manage long term operations and meet the needs of the local community.

Growing our Out of School Hours Care

In 2023-24 we were able to offer Out of School Hours Care (OSHC) programs at Bayles Regional Primary School, Lang Lang Primary School, St John the Baptist Primary School and Drouin South Primary School.

In addition to these four before and after school care programs, we also offered a school holiday program during the term breaks. We were delighted to see the growth in the school holiday program, which enabled us to meet the growing education and care needs of our school communities. In order to meet the demand for our holiday program we took steps to expand program capacity part way through the year.

We also identified internal process and system improvements, such as rostering and enrolments, with a view to improving the experience of families accessing our services.

CASE STUDY

Meet Kylie Jones, OSHC Lead Educator – Lang Lang

As Lead Educator Kylie Jones runs our Lang Lang OSHC together with an Assistant Educator.

In her day-to-day work at OSHC, Kylie plans activities, breakfast and afternoon snacks, and ensures all safety and first aid criteria are met and are up to date.

“I really like connecting with the kids and planning activities for them that are not related to schoolwork. So, you are able to really embrace their creativity and get to know different personalities,” says Kylie.

“At Windermere, everything is well thought through which is important for working with children. I also feel like I am part of a community. Everyone gets along so well and wants to work as a team. It’s helped me feel at home very quickly,” says Kylie.

Outside of both building a career and studying, Kylie makes the most out of the flexibility that comes with working OSHC hours. After an early start to her workday, she’s able to frequent the gym and yoga classes more often and enjoys catching up with friends over brunch.

Read more

Thanks to you

We are incredibly grateful for the many ways you have supported us over this year.

Your ongoing generosity allows us to continue to strengthen and improve the lives of the individuals and families we work with.

In 2023/24 we received

135

Donations

$173,401.62

Raised

Our Volunteer Board &
Committee Members

Gary Castricum – Chair

Kelly Dickson – Vice Chair

Mark Findlay – Treasurer

Malcolm Bailey

Rod Wiedermann

Dr. Janine Pickering

Elke Gjergja

George Selvanera


Advisory & Sub-Committees

Service & Enterprise Risk
Committee

Finance & Audit Advisory Committee

CEO Remuneration & Succession
Advisory Committee


Our significant donors and supporters

With grateful thanks


Patron

Carl Strachan, OAM

Ambassadors

David Parkin, OAM

Matthew Richardson


Corporate and community supporters


Trusts & Foundations

Financials

Effective, quality services
with financial prudence.

Financial Performance

Windermere has once more delivered a strong financial performance in the 23/24 financial year, resulting in a 25% increase in revenue.

This year we made a significant investment in the refurbishment of our Narre Warren office to create functional, safe and welcoming spaces for our consumers and staff for years to come.

We remain focused on positioning ourselves for ongoing investment in strategic projects that positively impact our consumers and staff through improved experiences and connection.

With those most vulnerable in our community at the forefront of everything we do, our continued positive financial result ensures our organisation remains sustainable and can continue to meet the needs of those in need.

Our Financials

Windermere offices are located at a number of sites across South Eastern Victoria.

Contact us for more details:

Phone: 1300 946 337 info@windermere.org.au