The practical skills of running your own week.
0117 Development of daily living and life skills
Cooking, money, transport, appointments, difficult conversations — taught in your own home with your own kit, and reviewed so you can see it working.
Participants working toward more independence, and coordinators who want a program that actually progresses.
Capacity building is the service that gets watered down most often across the sector: generic life skills with no progression and no way to tell whether anything changed. We run it as a program with a start, a shape and written reviews. For coordinators: this is where 0117 dollars either move the needle or quietly do not, and the difference is almost always whether anyone wrote the goals down.
What we provide
Daily living skills — cooking, budgeting, medication routines, household management, planning a week — taught in the participant’s own home with their own kit, not a clinical setting
Community and travel skills — using transport, managing appointments, navigating Centrelink and myGov, getting yourself to a job interview
Social and communication skills — interview practice, phone calls, de-escalation, setting boundaries with family
Money and admin — bank accounts, bills, online shopping, working out what something actually costs
Technology and staying safe online — phones, transport apps, video calls, and spotting a scam
Written goals and reviews — goals at intake, reviewed at 12 and 24 weeks, in plain enough language that the participant can say them back
Who it's for
A participant whose plan keeps funding capacity building year after year with nothing to show for it, and a coordinator who wants someone to actually run a program
A young adult moving toward independent living who needs the practical skills — cooking, money, transport — before the move rather than after it
A participant who has the skills but not the confidence, where the work is doing it with someone a few times until it stops being frightening
What makes us different
We write the goals down and we review them on a date, in writing, with the participant in the room. That sounds like the bare minimum and it is, and it is also the thing most often missing. The second difference is where the work happens: in the participant’s own kitchen with their own pans, on their own bus route, on their own phone. Skills learned in a service’s demonstration kitchen have a habit of staying there. The family-led part matters too — we understand the cultural weight that food, family meals and money carry in a lot of the households we support, and we build the work around the household rather than against it.
How it usually unfolds
First contact is a phone call with the coordinator or family — we want to know what has been tried, what has stuck and what has not. A senior worker does the first home visit, usually within five to seven days, to scope what the participant actually wants to be able to do. From there we write a 12-week program with weekly sessions and a small number of specific goals. Progress is reviewed at week six and week 12 in writing, in plain English, with the participant present. At 12 weeks we either write the next block or say honestly that the participant has got what they needed from it.
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