paul collaborated with a committed group of community and public sector leaders to design and deliver the FindHelpTas electronic services directory
Several years into my time leading the Communities for Children (CFC) initiative at Anglicare Tasmania, the organisation was granted additional funds from the Commonwealth to extend CFC activities. The circa 2013 agreement, known as Communities for Children Plus (CFC+), invited our high functioning team to explore more collaborative approaches to the support of vulnerable children and families across the state service and the not for profit sector.
Wasting no time with the new grant funds, the team and I coordinated a series of CFC+ cross sector meetings. Leaders from Child Protection, Family Violence, Child and Family Health, and the not for profit charitable sector assembled at “Roundtable” meetings to identify new ways of working, prioritise projects, and direct our collective work.
The idea of a Tasmanian Electronic Services Directory was voted the number project. It had been a long-held goal of the sector to establish a “centrally maintained community service database”. If done well, the online directory would provide the public with an accurate service list and save agencies precious time each year assembling service lists to inform their clients and staff. It would also end the frustratingly brain numbing practice of using Bachelor of Social Work students and TAFE students on prac placement to update service lists.
The CFC Team and I worked with the sector leaders for more than two years to create the “authorising environment”, the model, the technology, and the funding pool to establish and sustain the directory. In essence we had leaders from a dozen not for profits agree to a small annual fee and commit to keeping their service information on the directory up to date. The proceeds of the funding pool was used for marketing and promotion, and was earmarked to grow as the number of partnering agencies grew. It was forecast that the pool of funds could eventually support a part time administrative officer to coordinate the website.
I still recall the meeting with the Anglicare Marketing Team when we landed on the service name and resolved to register the web domain. I had worked with the CFC Team to develop a short list of service names, and bounced the options around with my leadership peers. We recommended “findhelptas”, and the directory name has remained unchanged for more than a decade.
Like most projects of this scale it was not without its tensions, compromises, and delays. The first was the completely unexpected emergence of a national service directory, largely supported by the homelessness sector. The Ask Izzy website was launched nationwide at almost the same time as we were preparing to go public. Based on different technology we we were complementing rather than duplicating effort. The second, was a mind-boggling internal move by my Deputy CEO to re-brand the directory as an Anglicare product. After first seeking to kill the project when Ask Izzy was launched, the Deputy CEO pivoted to use the directory to market our agency above our collaborative partners. I fought hard for over two years to build trust within the Roundtable participants, and this “rebranding move” would destroy trust and undermine the very foundation of the cooperative approach. I lost some skin, but won the argument. In 2014/15 we launched a functioning and sustainable directory that was built by the community for the community (with no Anglicare branding to be seen).
Given how close we were to losing the Directory to an internal power play, I set about arguing the case for a genuinely “independent” host of the findhelptas service. Using the CFC+ Roundtable process, and with the full support of the co-funding partners, I promoted and pursued TasCOSS as the final destination for the website. The TasCOSS CEO was fully supportive and over the course of the following 6 months the service transferred to them, and has gone through many significant improvements due to their leadership in the decade since.
