Our first eight months at CatholicCare Victoria have been focused on our clients, our people and Integration! Integration! Integration! with a lot of hard work and dedication to bring together our previous agencies.
Our work and mission in local communities has remained first and foremost amongst our new state-wide service.
Now eight months in the role, CatholicCare Victoria CEO Agnes Sheehan has been busy with getting to know our staff and services, managing mission as usual and of course, bringing together CatholicCare Victoria!
Agnes has shared with us a bit about what’s been happening these past few months, our goals and ambitions, and what the next four months are looking like for CatholicCare Victoria.
Photo: Executive Director Ross Wheatland with CEO Agnes Sheehan at a social housing property.
What has CatholicCare Victoria been working on in the past eight months?
“We have been busy supporting our people with regard to mission as usual, so the day-to-day support. But the executive team and myself have also been working on a massive program of work.
We’ve been working on the integration management program, which is about bringing together almost 500 staff across three agencies, over 60 programs, 25+ locations and unifying them into one organisation. So lots of staff consultation, lots of listening, and lots of learning. On July 14 we presented the proposed organisation structure to our Board who gave us the green light to take our proposal to staff for consultation. We have just completed the consultation process with intensive engagement with staff for their feedback and ideas on this proposed structure. We are presently reviewing all the feedback and we intend to come back to our people by the end of August with the final decision after considering all the feedback.
With the backdrop of increasing levels of homelessness and rising housing costs, Social Housing is also a big one on our agenda - we have a subsidiary Centacare Housing Service (CHS) and with the support of CatholicCare Victoria, CHS is committed to becoming a state-wide community partner with the Victorian Government to deliver their 10 Year Social Housing Plan with a focus on Regional Victoria. The Catholic Church has a long tradition of supporting social services through collaborative partnerships, and we are working with a number of parishes across the state to evaluate the suitability of land for social housings.
CatholicCare Victoria (CCV) has the capacity to offer good quality, well located and affordable housing combined with appropriate wrap-around services and community integration to provide a secure base that enables the most disadvantaged and vulnerable members of the community to stabilise their home life, build their capabilities, enhance their wellbeing and gradually move towards greater independence and self-reliance. We would welcome a discussion with Parishes across the state who may wish to partner with CCV to address the shortage of social housing in their area.
We welcome the Victorian Government’s Big Housing Build and we believe that we are well positioned to become a productive and enduring partner to Homes Victoria in expanding the supply of social housing across the State. We responded to the Homes Victoria, Social Housing Growth Fund Rapid Growth Round (SHGF RGR) and we expect an announcement regarding our tender shortly. CHS, lead by Ross Wheatland, is now preparing for our second bid submission which will go in later this year.
We have worked with our Chair John Sheldon and the CCV Board to set up all the governance infrastructure for the Board and for four subcommittees – Mission and Formation, Finance and Audit, Risk and Compliance, and Renumeration and Nomination. I also attend the fortnightly project control group for social housing, as we work through our existing submission as well as planning and building our new submission.
I’ve been meeting with people in the regions, and while sometimes meetings have been cancelled due to COVID, I’m certainly trying to get out to meet as many of our people as possible. We’ve had Board meetings in Warragul and East Melbourne, as well as Warrnambool and Shepparton (but COVID lockdowns meant these two were held through Zoom, with local staff presenting to the Board on their programs).
Since the start of the year we’ve just really been listening and learning from our teams, and reaching out where possible to government - so I’ve had a number of meetings with government departments, and I attended a briefing in Canberra around Employment Services too.
It has been a really wonderful first eight months working with our people on mission as usual, the integration program, and social housing. This work will continue, however the Executives and our teams also need to starting thinking about our strategic planning program so we are ready for our Board Strategic Planning day in October where we will work with the Board on developing how CatholicCare Victoria wants to grow over the next three years.
So not much to do really!”
What are some of the goals and ambitions we are working towards for CatholicCare Victoria?
“We have a set of outlined goals for CatholicCare Victoria, so I’ll talk through a few of these:
To enhance and strengthen service provision to the vulnerable and marginalised, facilitating improved coordination and greater choice for clients.
“Our people continue to support our clients, and our Executive teams are focusing on growing our services in a few areas. The areas we’ve been focused on in the last few months are advocating with ministers with regard to Prison Chaplaincy; we have just responded to a Department of Families, Fairness and Housing tender for Residential Care in our regional areas; and as I mentioned earlier we are focusing on expanding our response to the Social Housing needs of our communities; as well as supporting various fundraising initiatives.”
To ensure that our client and community programs meet local needs.
“It’s really about getting out there and seeing how we can work together through other alliances. We’ve been focused on meeting with our own people and listening to them, because our people really know what’s needed. So we’re listening and learning from our people first.”
To build CatholicCare Victoria’s reputation as a leading and influential Catholic provider of charitable and caring services in Victoria.
“The big objective of bringing the organisations together was to ensure there was no impact on our clients – and to ensure we continue to serve our clients in the best way possible. In actual fact, we’ve served more clients in the first six months than we had separately in the six months at the same time last year. Admittedly, COVID would have had some influence on that, but we continue to serve more clients than we have in previous years. Our progress with this goal is also determined through what our clients provide as feedback – and we’ve just done a client survey to hear what they have to say.”
To significantly improve our engagement with key stakeholders including parishes, Church organisations, government, volunteers and benefactors.
“We’ve certainly had a stronger engagement with the Church in engaging them with some of our programs, but this is a work in progress. In the proposed organisation structure, we have proposed to expand our team to enhance Community Engagement, and this will really help us to engage with our key stakeholders.”
To provide a positive, diverse, safe and supportive workplace for our people – who in turn are engaged, committed and highly productive.
“We listen and we must ensure everyone feels safe and valued in our organisation. With regard to Catholic Social Teaching (which guide our work at CatholicCare Victoria) two of the key principles are Solidarity and Subsidiarity - from a subsidiarity perspective, it is core to who we are that we really listen, and our staff see their voices heard in our actions.”
To ensure CatholicCare Victoria is recognised for good corporate governance, complying with all regulatory frameworks and be accountable and transparent to its stakeholders and the wider community.
“We’ve gone from smaller organisations to a much larger organisation, and so we have gone the extra mile to ensure good corporate governance, compliance to regulations, and that all that infrastructure is set in place. In March we held a Commissioning Mass for CatholicCare Victoria in Melton, and this was a wonderful opportunity for us to come together with the people who make CatholicCare Victoria who it is – our whole community. We’ve also started a Diversity and Inclusion Committee, and we have a lot of great initiatives we’re working on at the moment. We will continue working together with our people and stakeholders on these initiatives as we build CatholicCare Victoria.”
What are our key goals or priorities for the next four months?
“Our key goals are to excel in serving our clients and our communities; to ensure our people are supported in the work they do and are engaged in who we are; to engage with our stakeholders and communities in our transformation and where we’re heading; to be successful in the tenders we’ve put in; and to embed our new organisation and be a unified organisation. Our people have put a lot of work into the tenders to grow our services.
As a Catholic Social Services organisation, we are here to support the disadvantaged, the marginalised and those at risk, and so this will always be a priority for us at CatholicCare Victoria.”
Agnes Sheehan | Chief Executive Officer
Liz Gellel | Marketing Coordinator – Digital Lead
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