CareWest pre-school infants -- "a better start to their education"
CareWest has been one of the key, most respected, community care organisations in Orange and the Central West since it was launched as a regional non-governmental care agency 28 years ago.
Today, its essential programs and activities cover, among other things, disability needs, aged and dementia welfare, pre-school care, aboriginal support and family stress services – all crucial to the health of the regional community and entrusted to CareWest and funded by the federal and state governments.
As CareWest’s CEO, Tim Curran says: “We’ve proved we can do it well.” But now the organisation is considering putting more resources into its own grassroots care and community building programs in the coming years.
Tim Curran says CareWest’s success as a partner in federal and state government-funded care initiatives has brought it to the point where it’s now looking to more of its own “community capacity building” initiatives – areas where the governments can’t or don’t choose to put money.
“Most of what CareWest has done until now is responding to governments needing change or putting some service out to tender,” he says. “The delivery of government-funded services is very important, and we’ll always do that.
”But we want to move back to the community development approach – working back at the grassroots level — where we’ll put more focus on what we call ‘community capacity building’.”
Going back to the grassroots takes CareWest full circle, in some respects – back to the bold community initiatives that founded the care organisation in Orange nearly three decades ago.
It was in 1984 that a group of volunteer community elders decided the city needed a system of independent, non-governmental care. Since then, CareWest has grown into a major outsource partner for government care funding, which now totals $20 million a year or 85 percent of its revenue.
It currently employs over 200 people, and an army of volunteers, and has offices in seven Central West centres.
Another major challenge that CareWest faces in the coming years is providing care and support for the projected sharp increase in retired and old aged citizens, amid the strain it’s likely to exert on the economy and care resources generally.
But as Tim Curran points out in this in-depth ONN video interview and current affairs presentation, the governments have moved already to relieve the “age crisis” pressure by extending the retirement age to 67 and encouraging more ageing people to continue working.
Derek Maitland tells the CareWest story in detail in this, our first stand-alone video current affairs program:
