CEO’ S MESSAGE
PATRICIA OCCELLI
This year is a landmark year for Interrelate as it celebrates its 90th year of service to the community. Since our humble beginnings as the Father and Son and then mother and daughter movement, we have continued to work with individuals and families to support the development of healthy relationships and to support the development of new skills and resilience to strengthen relationships.
The collective wisdom and passion of our staff continues to be captured through our staff reference and service practice groups who have achieved many successes in strategic reform, program development, cultural alignment and service access and quality and social corporate responsibility.
These reference groups had many successes including: the endorsement by Reconciliation Australia of the Interrelate Innovate Reconciliation Action Plan. The representation of Interrelate at the Indigenous women’ s and men’ s health conference and being recognised as a top 5 finalist for the City Switch awards against organisations such as Bupa and NAB amongst other quite large organisations. These efforts show how our collective efforts can make a significant impact. I would like to thank our staff who contribute to these groups and our executive whose leadership help drive results.
In addition to great results this year we saw another reduction in real government spending into our services by the Commonwealth Government. A freeze to CPI Indexation to the Family Law Services resulted in a net reduction of $ 300,000 to our budget. Costs of service delivery increases each year: this is due to actual expenses in operating and more significantly increase in staffing costs with the Equal Remuneration Order, increases committed through the enterprise agreement and our current commitment to stay 5 % ahead of the award for wages. Despite this, we were able to maintain service to more than 61,000 people in our network of centres and school based programs.
The decision by government to stop the drought funding support in the Central West also saw a reduction in service delivery in those areas. Nonetheless as an organisation, we continue to be committed to doing all that we can to ensure that the communities of Warren, Cobar and Walgett are supported.
Significant efforts undertaken at a Regional and Head Office level to manage our expenditure more effectively has enabled us to retain the level of service delivery across the organisation. These efficiencies have been managed through reduction in expenditure( telephone, internet, printing, amenities, property costs and staff vacancy based on turn over and replacement of staff) and increased collection and management of client fees. Staff have all played a significant part in coordinating and enabling these strategies.
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