Industry Focus

SOCIAL SECTOR An able future As the National Disability Insurance Scheme begins its slow sweep across Australia, two organisations share their transition experiences WORDS: AMAL AWAD With approximately 600,000 Not for Profit (NFP) organisations operating throughout Australia, across a broad range of sectors, new marketplaces are evolving. New legislation being piloted, namely the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), will have a big impact on the way charitable organisations service the community. As of September 2013, DisabilityCare Australia became known as the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA). Seven offices in four NDIS launch sites are now open for business. NDIS CEO, David Bowen, says in a September edition of NDIS News that it's very satisfying to begin working with scheme participants and to assist people 8 Industry Focus with disability—and their families—to plan and start their journeys towards long-term goals and aspirations. "As at 13 September, more than 1300 plans are agreed or under development, and we are working closely with people with disability who are making the transition from existing state or Commonwealth arrangements to their personal plan as part of the NDIS," says Bowen. The NDIS is set to have a profound impact on disability services organisation Yooralla when the scheme begins its roll-out in 2016. At the moment, the majority of funding for Yooralla's 20,000-strong customer base comes from government sources and supplementary fundraising. CFO Michael Bowers says that from an operational perspective, not much is expected to change. But from a back office, planning and strategic perspective, the roll-out will necessitate a transition. It will be a user-pays system, meaning Yooralla will be billing customers for services, which will have cash flow implications. "We are fully aware that we need to upgrade a lot of our systems to be able to cater for the way the NDIS is going to work," says Bowers. "We're going to go from just the billing of customers to something that is fairly foreign to our business, because the way we work with the government funding, generally, is that the government provides us with an amount

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