ADSSI’s Story

About Adssi In-Home Support

Adssi In-Home Support (formerly Adssi HomeLiving Australia) is a community-based organisation committed to helping frail aged and younger people living with disability to stay safely in their own homes. Adssi’s footprint covers the Central Coast, the Hunter and Northern Sydney.

What was the problem you were having before you discovered Blakworks?

We knew that we needed to do something about working in Aboriginal communities to build our client base and to employ more Aboriginal staff – but we didn’t know how to do it. We simply didn’t know how to start to make Adssi a culturally safe organisation.

We needed some achievable targets to work towards, and Blakworks helped us work out what those targets should be. We then had a goal to achieve a workforce that mirrored the Aboriginal population on the Central Coast (4%).

Our staff are really on board because they all went through the Aboriginal Cultural Awareness for Workplaces sessions. Our staff gained gain a respect for traditional Aboriginal culture, contemporary Aboriginal experience, and how that relates to workplaces and employment opportunities.

What did the frustration feel like as you tried to solve that problem?

We knew that we needed to strengthen our connection to local Aboriginal communities and to prepare our workplace for success with Aboriginal staff. And, although we had strong support at a management and board level, we were unsure about what we needed to do, and what it would take to do it well.

What was different about Blakworks?

Blakworks considered what we needed, then offered us The Fast Track – a program that got us on the right track quickly. In just three months, we:

• Developed a clear vision of where we were headed, and a plan to achieve it

• Put 90% of our staff through Blakworks’ Aboriginal Cultural Awareness For Workplaces training

• Implemented a Welcomes to Country and Acknowledgements of Country workplace policy and procedure

• Had a provisionally endorsed RAP, ready for final approval

Through the process, we also reviewed our recruitment and selection practices for new staff and removed unnecessary barriers and established clear pathways for recruitment of Aboriginal staff. Doing so has improved the process for all of our candidates.

Take us to the moment you realised our product was actually working to solve your problem

We invested in our people and put them all through the Aboriginal Cultural Awareness for Workplaces training. Staff were coming to me and saying that it was the best professional development they’d ever done. This resulted in us being able to quickly build a workplace that is overwhelmingly supportive of our reconciliation vision, and of Aboriginal employment in particular.

Tell us what life looks like now that your problem is solved or being solved

In three years we had grown quite significantly and by 2020 we had 239 staff, 9 of whom identify as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. That is 4%, which is representative of our local community and a goal of our strategy. Even better, the turnover of Aboriginal staff has remained at zero. And, for the first time in our history, we gained an Aboriginal volunteer – it’s very exciting!

From 1% to 4% in just a few years, with zero turnover, is just the beginning. We will continue to grow our Aboriginal workforce, and will now turn our attention to improving the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander clients we serve.