Page 479 - Week 02 - Thursday, 11 February 2021
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about their experience of homelessness and the support and accommodation they had been provided.
She often took a proactive role, helping to explain sector processes to residents and to clarify the requirements of the service. Any complaints or grievances are communicated to the service provider, and an opportunity was provided to discuss the situation from their perspective or undertake to remedy the situation. Ms Lucas advises that all the visitable services were welcoming and responsive. The COVID-19 pandemic meant that no visits could be conducted between March and June 2020, including to the three new visitable sites.
Ms Lucas was the first appointee to the Official Visitor for Homelessness Services role since its inception in 2012. Over this period, she has fulfilled her role competently and compassionately by ensuring that individuals who were homeless or at risk of homelessness and dependent on service providers for accommodation and support had their rights upheld and were treated with respect and dignity.
Ms Lucas’s term expired in September 2020. In her final report, Ms Lucas wrote that she is honoured to have held the position since its establishment, and she is grateful for the support provided to her over the years by the government, by the management and staff of visitable places, and by the Public Trustee and Guardian and other official visitors.
She also thanks the hundreds of entitled persons who shared their stories and concerns with her over the past eight years. They helped to shape specialist homelessness services into the responsive, accountable, cooperative and ethical sector and organisations that they are today.
In her 2019-20 annual report, Ms Lucas concludes with these words:
The ACT response to homelessness may never be perfect, due to the demand and the resources available, but the system seems to be working as well as it can within those constraints. Housing ACT, OneLink, and the Specialist Homelessness Service Providers provide a streamlined ‘partnership’ to move people from homelessness to some kind of permanent housing. Specialist Homelessness services manage a diverse range of clients with a multitude of issues, many of them very complex. They have to tailor their responses to the individual clients and also have to manage clients’ expectations. A lot of it depends on the quality of the staff and leadership in the services, and I am, as usual, impressed by their commitment and dedication.
I thank Ms Lucas for her commitment and her contribution over these past eight years. Her dedication saw the realisation of this role within the homelessness sector and the Canberra community. Her work has been vital to safeguarding and promoting the interests of vulnerable individuals in our community.
The ACT community is lucky to have benefited from Ms Lucas’s dedication to championing an approach to human service delivery that puts people at its centre and ensures that services are responsive to the diverse needs of people. We thank her for her work in this role and wish her the very best in her future endeavours.
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