Image of bright yellow sunglasses and beads

Getting NDIS ready is also about deciding how you want to manage your NDIS funds.

There are three ways to manage your NDIS funding. The National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) can help you manage payments to your providers, you can manage these payments yourself (Self Management) or you can have another provider (a Plan Manager) assist you. You can even mix them!

In your planning meeting we want you to be informed about your options so you can state clearly what you would like to happen.

We’re going to be dedicating some air time in the next while to the two options called Plan Management and Self Management.

Please note that at the time of publication the NDIA launched a new website. On the old website there were two documents that clearly described Plan Management and we cannot locate them on the new website despite a lot of looking!

So….. Here is a link to information published by the A.C.T Government about these choices.

Here is another run-down about it.

These three options for managing your funds continue to exist!

Plan Managers need to be registered providers, so you can find and engage with them once you receive your plan, and through other organisations and businesses which are now listing providers.

Lauren Hislop lives in the Hunter NSW NDIS site and tells us about using a registered Plan Management provider.

Photo of Lauren Hislop

Goals are a bit daunting important

A few years ago I was initially a bit daunted about the prospect of setting goals for my first NDIS plan. I thought, “what if I’m currently satisfied with my life?”   However, as I did some self exploration, I discovered that there were, in fact, areas of my life that I wanted to improve.

I considered questions (and you can too) such as;

“what do I want my life to look like?”

“what excites me?” and

“what would infuse my life with colour?”

I had to be open to the possibilities.

My advice to people planning their goals is not to be afraid to dream big. When I first wrote my goals I was afraid to dream big. I wasn’t sure what goals to list, and maybe you aren’t sure too. However, with encouragement from others I dared to state my desires.

One of my goals was and is to find work.

Obtaining employment is one of my greatest desires. Being equipped with three university degrees I assumed I would get a position. However due to structural barriers I have found it a struggle. Unfortunately my disability overshadows my skills.

Turning goals into reality

Once I had established what my goals were, I had to figure out how to implement them. My goals were a template for my life.

When I received my first NDIS plan, it appeared great on paper. However I had no idea how to use it. I consider myself intelligent and yet I couldn’t figure out how to take advantage of it. At that time, NDIA were paying my support providers directly. Unfortunately I began to feel nothing had changed from before NDIS. I had the same agency providing me with the same care, but I was wanted something different.

Infusing my plan and life with colour

Last year I decided to engage a plan manager to help manage my funds. I also had some Supports Co-ordination hours in my plan to help with these kinds of things as well. I chose a local organisation that don’t provide any other kinds of services. I really like their independence and their values. These are two important things to look out for in my opinion.

From the moment I engaged a plan manager my life began to infuse with colour. I cannot believe how my life has changed. I have a plan manager, who puts me at the forefront of making my own decisions. They check to see how I’m going. They have done things like:

help me recruit my own workers

keep track of my budget

pay and process invoices

problem-solve with providers

This is definitely the best choice for me. I feel like I’m actually living life! It is so good to know that you are in control without having to deal with the mundane bits. It has made the principles, such as choice, a voice and control a reality in my life.

Gaining skills and finding work

Because I plan manage, I can use different kinds of services and supports to achieve the goals in my plan. I can definitely use disability services if I want, but I can also think beyond these. Previously I thought I had to use disability support workers for everything. This is one of the benefits of plan management and self management. I can look to different people, businesses and organisations in my community to help me achieve my goals.

In my plan I have some funding to help me develop confidence in my ability to undertake paid work. This is the importance of thinking about goals, because if I didn’t state this as a goal, it might not have led to this funding.

One brilliant outcome is I have used this funding to improve my professional skills.

I am a researcher and writer and have been looking for work in this area. I have been writing for  different disability rights organisations. There is a lot of great opportunity here with a growing number of organisations valuing and paying people with disability to write. This got us talking about the online world, content marketing and social media marketing opportunities. My plan manager informed me I could use my funding to engage someone in this area to mentor and train me.

I was put in touch with Andrea, a small business marketing consultant. Her training definitely equipped me better, so when Libby asked me to work for InCharge in this area, I was ecstatic.  This training will also help me with future opportunities. It enhances my appeal to other organisations who would like to contract me. I cannot express how much economic participation means to me and other people with disabilities. We yearn to be productive.

Freedom in finding my own support workers

One of the greatest benefits I have from plan management is that it has helped me to recruit my own support workers. Initially I just had personal care for an hour each day to help me shower and dress. I had no idea I could use workers for accessing the community  and other things.

There has been great freedom in interviewing and choosing for myself. My worker is invaluable. She does things like takes me shopping, attends appointments with me, helps with filing and making calls because my speech is slurred, and acts like a personal assistant in work meetings. Having this assistance has allowed me to feel that I am a valued member in the community. I set the hours she works. I’m in control.

In my opinion we need to make the most of our plan. This will not only impact on us as individuals but on society as a whole. If we have support we can use our talents and skills to enhance society. Enjoy the journey!

Marianne Williamson wrote

“It is our light, not our darkness
That most frightens us.”

It’s time to let our light shine

Brightly coloured flowers

Lucy and her family have been very thoughtful in creating a role at her local florist. In this article we share the very practical steps they took.

Download the word version of Engineering the ordinary

Download the PDF version of Engineering the ordinary

“If I look at you like an impoverished person and you see yourself as a victim, no amount of money will change this.”

Below is an excerpt of a speech I delivered for The School for Social Entrepreneurs titled “Social Enterprise and its potential for creating more inclusive and sustainable communities” – February 20th, 2014.

“I’m very excited this evening to tell you a bit about the enterprise I founded, InCharge, and also to share my thoughts on the connections between social enterprise, genuine innovation and the creation of an inclusive society.

When I was 7 years old, my older brother, Matthew, left our family home, to be cared for elsewhere. Far from aiding our family as it was promised to be, it skewed it, and sent my brother on the path of a different and separate life to us. He spent his childhood languishing and abused in a large hostel and then in group homes. I remember arriving at his 18th birthday celebration to find that the only people there were his immediate family, and the paid staff of his group home. I remember my father cried. It was a wake-up call for me.

Imagine if your only relationships were with people paid to be there? This is the life experience of a client, not a contributor. So something had to change.

Matthew has now lived in his own home for 16 years and shared it consistently with people without disability. He has his own small business built on his interests and capacities. He has frequent gatherings of friends, supporters and family.

The difference is extraordinary. Yet Matthew is only one of 400,000 people with significant disabilities in Australia. So actually and unfortunately his deprivation is not unusual.

InCharge was created to change the experiences of others who struggle to experience a life of contribution and rich relationships. Our vision is a society where everyone’s potential is realised and where we thrive among people who love and care about us.

We exist to assist people with disability be the authors of their own lives. When people are truly in charge they are ignited by possibility in their own lives, and they also have the resources, tools and mindset to go get it. This is a self-directed life. Through our products, services and partnerships we seek to ignite possibility and then assist people put the pieces in place that turn possibility into reality.

Why is this important?

Let’s go back to that moment when my parents stepped forward and asked for assistance. What did they encounter? Well they encountered a human service system. It is now an industry, and it is essentially predicated on the belief that ‘special’ people need specialist solutions delivered by experts in specially built places. Separate schools, classrooms, homes, workplaces and centres to train people and provide therapy and other interventions. Mostly we encounter people as they drive past us in white buses or as they move in groups through our shopping centres. We see them in the distance of our lives. In our desire to assist people get a better deal we have actually created the tools of exclusion.

Such a system cannot deliver the stuff of a good life. It cannot deliver love, it cannot deliver intimacy, it cannot deliver belonging or purpose, friendship, or being an actor in one’s own life.

Ultimately this is what we want for ourselves; a life of contribution, a life of richness.

If we are to bring such an inclusive community to life then we need to look now in different places for solutions. This is all of our business – to look for the real leaders and the genuine solutions.

We are fortunate in Australia that there are now many more opportunities for people to step beyond a life lived in ‘service land’. There are so many more people now who have ideas about their good life, who are trying things and who have different expectations. Who are basically sticking their fingers up at the persistent and draining low expectations that pervades our society.

So we believe that one of the most powerful things that can happen is to shine a light, support and nurture ideas people are generating themselves. These are the places it make sense to look for the kinds of solutions that really create an inclusive society. And this is also where support to social enterprise could be of such benefit.

As the founder of InCharge I have chosen a social enterprise framework because it has allowed the freedom to find the best ways to shine a light and support genuine innovation. It has been so beneficial to explore the kind of petri dish that bubbles and ignites this stuff. Remaining loose but focussed, allows us to explore the spaces between, where exciting things might burst forth. I believe the 4 way partnership that has supported Nathan – who will speak to you in a moment – to become an SSE student is a fine example of this. Social enterprise has really helped us to think about our sustainability. The idea that we can create our own resources and scale when we need to. Focussing on the internal assets and capacities of the organisation as a starting place to generate value, including financial value, has been revolutionary to me coming from a traditional non-profit background.

So you are going to hear from Nathan Basha tonight.

But what other interesting innovations are we finding?

People with significant disabilities are finding ways for themselves to work. Micro-enterprise and small niche businesses are becoming a very attractive idea for many people assessed out of employment support, and otherwise find themselves relegated to a drab life of endless activities, community access and training.

People are finding very interesting ways of being supported to move into their own homes, thus breaking the nexus of the non-choice between being their parents home forever or living with other people with disabilities. They are living with people without disabilities, they are creating intentional communities of disabled and non disabled people.

People with intellectual disability and their advocates are creating pathways into university

1. see University of Sydney
2. and the formative program in Alberta, Canada

They are building their own enterprises built to address very specific barriers – please look on our links page for some fabulous examples.

So what are the threads that bind these kinds of ideas, projects and movements?

I want share with you what I think are some of the hallmarks of genuine innovation. Again I hope you see the universality in these for all of us working to create more inclusive societies.

Sustainability

Long lasting, personal relationships are the key to ongoing quality of life. Innovative enterprises create a more inclusive society by assisting people to tap into the wealth of ideas, people, energy and financial resources within their own networks, or to build these where they don’t exist.

 Active citizenry

People are not just receivers. Innovative enterprises showcase and build on people’s innate capacities and interests, in order to realise potential.

Addressing adaptive barriers to change

When we are seeking to be the author of our own life, many things have the potential to de-rail us. What are the barriers to change that confront those in the communities you work in?

For people with disability for example, the fear of being rejected when you take a step forward in your community can be a huge thing, but making lasting change depends upon stepping forward.? Innovative enterprises aspire to be with and for people in their own efforts at change.

Developing rich relationships

Unsatisfied with the dominance of paid relationships, innovative enterprises break this dominance and offer people a vision of a life lived with many different kinds of people and relationships.

Welcoming environments

Innovative enterprises work with the richness that already exists in our community to assist it become more adept? at inclusion. We don’t need to keep building separate.

Autonomy and control

Innovative enterprises focus on the conditions in which autonomy and greater control by people themselves can thrive.

I think we need to invest in the leaders, projects or enterprises which are attempting to show value in very non traditional areas and seeking the kinds of impacts that go to the heart of an inclusive society then we are on to something very exciting indeed.

Thank you for your time.”

In August 2013 I had the great privilege of being a participant at this incredible thing called Awesomeness Fest.

Held in Bali, and the brain-child of entrepreneur Vishen Lakhiani, Awesomeness Fest lived up to its crazy name. Part TEDTalks, part leadership development, part personal development, part business development, part networking (a profound kind, not the skimming kind) and all over extreme fun.

I was thrilled to attend alongside Nathan Basha who, by the way, is your next keynote speaker – BOOK HIM NOW!

I learned so much, and I’d like to share some great stuff connected with the 5 elements of being truly incharge. One of these is Living Your Potential.

Low expectations – an absolute killer

People with disabilities are by and large, plagued by low expectations. Centuries old and deeply embedded not just in the community but often in the consciousness of those close by, like family. Couple this with another deeply held view – of people as recipients only, as just the receivers of service and the good of others – and we’re in trouble. Low expectations and not a contributor in your own right? It’s a killer combination.

Thinking big

So when we talk about Living Your Potential our vision is really that. Let’s smash the ceiling. Let’s think big for ourselves and those we love.

I believe that a significant experience of disability is no barrier because all human beings need 2 great things to thrive and be fulfilled – the need to grow ourselves and the need to contribute. If we’re thinking that this isn’t for the person close to us then we too are plagued by that killer combination. Living our potential is all about what is deeply inside every person and how we can live from that place. When we are working from this place, we more easily attract others to join with us, and we can more readily see, create and jump on opportunities. When we are in this place then all the tools, financial resources and practical skills needed for self-direction have great purpose. The reason for them, and the use of them, is much clearer.

Some tools to think big

Here are some things I learned at Awesomeness Fest that may grab you. They are all about asking yourself some really cool questions.

If you’re answering these questions with someone you care about, I urge you to think deeply, creatively and laterally into these spaces. If people can’t articulate an answer, how else can we know and discover these things about them? How can we challenge our own beliefs and assumptions that might hold someone back?

Idea 1 – find your outrage!

What are your core values?

One way of finding this out is by tapping in to your outrage!

How can you tap into your outrage? Tell someone trusted a couple of your Hell No stories!

What’s a Hell No story? Well it’s just that – it’s a time in your life when you decided enough was enough. Something had crossed your line and you decided to take a stand.

The job of the person at the receiving end of your Hell No story is to pick out the words dripping with meaning and start asking you why this is so important. Keep asking questions about why and eventually you’ll start looping back on yourself or you’ll get to a ‘just because!’ answer where there is no explanation because you just feel so deeply about this.

There you have a core value! This is what drives you. In here is your great gift.

What is your great gift? The thing you have inside you that has no off-switch. Perhaps it stopped working for a bit and this is when you noticed it; you noticed it gone and life wasn’t the same.

Idea 2 – what is your eventuality?

What the? Eventuality?

This is a way to take a crack at those seeds of self-doubt when you’re working on/out your bold mission.

Shake self-doubt by thinking of your bold mission as an eventuality. Behind your vision are forces propelling it into creation. It will happen with or without you so why not you in there as part of it or as leading it?

What is your eventuality?

Write it down and then remove yourself from the equation. Will it come true? What are the forces that will make it eventual?

When we are mission-driven and communicate our passion and our big dreams we excite, invite and entice people naturally. What an exciting way to think about asking, inviting people and building your tribe. When people see that it’s going to happen, that it’s big and powerful they are much more likely to join with you. This is such a great technique when we think about asking and inviting others in to our lives countering the isolation that is the experience of many many people.

For more on this see the guy who’s idea it was – Khailee Ng

Idea 3 – The 3 most important questions

And finally you might find that these questions really grab you.

All of us have two great needs – to grow ourselves and to contribute. True fulfilment comes when we do this – when we get to experience great things and become a more creative person, and when we get to put something back.

We can make a list in three different areas that help us with this.

Experiences – make a list of all the things you want to do and get out of life. On your last day you look back and feel like you’ve truly done it. Think about this as if time and money were no object.

Growth – make a list of all the ways you want to grow and become a more creative human being.

These first two can mean happiness. Fulfilment comes when we think about contribution.

Contribution – make a list of all the ways you want to contribute to the world. This is not saying that the purpose of life is to give. But rather, life is just better, life is fulfilling when we can chip in to it.

Click here if you want to be guided through these questions by the guy behind AFest, Vishen Lakhiani.

I’d love to hear how you go!