Page 2205 - Week 06 - Thursday, 6 June 2019
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The family safety hub is a space for new ideas, a connector for service providers and a champion for change. The family safety hub draws on existing research and the insights gathered during co-design to understand the barriers, gaps and opportunities for change that exist in the service systems. Potential solutions progress through the family safety hub’s innovation process—a framework for the development, testing and evaluation of new ideas—to a prototype or pilot. The family safety hub tackles one problem at a time and brings people together with expertise and experience to develop new solutions.
The first problem the family safety hub has looked at is improving early intervention for pregnant women and new parents. This has led to the family safety hub’s first pilot program, which is a health justice partnership that is providing free and confidential legal services and advice in healthcare settings, particularly to vulnerable women who have multiple legal issues. Evidence shows that one in five women whose partners use violence experience that violence during pregnancy.
Although the pilot is still in its first few months, feedback from our partners has been positive, and the service is meeting an unmet need, as almost no clients have had legal assistance before. Around one-quarter of clients are from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. At one partnership site, 25 per cent have identified as having a mental illness or disability. In this budget $300,000 for 2019-20 has been committed to ensure that this new legal service for pregnant women experiencing domestic and family violence can continue for another year to provide time to evaluate the service and build system capability.
The family safety hub’s second challenge topic is preventing housing and financial crisis for people leaving a violent relationship. Discovery research identified many barriers and opportunities as well as service gaps that can lead to a crisis. In early May this year, over 40 people, from sectors including banking, real estate, housing, community services and government, and people living with the experience of domestic and family violence, came together for an intensive workshop to generate and refine ideas that could prevent this crisis. The next stage of this work will take the ideas generated and test their feasibility for becoming pilot projects.
These examples demonstrate the momentum being built through the family safety hub, which has been operating for just over 12 months. In the next 12 months it is expected that the development and delivery of solutions will make an even greater tangible change to the lives of people affected by domestic and family violence.
As I mentioned earlier, 2019-20 is the fourth year of funding for the first phase of commitments under the original safer families package. The cumulative impact of these investments has built an important foundation. The first phase of safer families has strengthened the capacity of front-line services to respond to domestic and family violence. It has improved coordination across government, built important partnerships with the community sector and tested promising new approaches.
Some of the early initiatives that have been funded through the safer families package will be transitioned out of the package after 2019-20. During the coming financial
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