Thousands of our most vulnerable Canberrans seek out the services of our community sector each year, including early support and prevention services for children and families, health and education services, access to legal supports, and efforts to tackle climate change.
The ACT Government is committed to supporting these essential services, providing over $200 million each year to support social infrastructure and services that meet the diverse needs of Canberrans.
Through Commissioning, we have embarked on a 10-year reform for our human service system to ensure it meets the needs of Canberrans, particularly those who need services and supports the most.
We, government and the community and health sector, formally began our commissioning journey in 2021 as new way of designing, funding, and delivering human services in the ACT.
Effective commissioning shifts government and sector contract relationships from transactional and fixed to more relational and flexible partnerships. Partnerships that continuously improve how we meet and respond to community needs.
This is achieved by applying commissioning to have open conversations that explore issues and approaches so that we can all – government, peaks, service providers and people with lived experience develop an understanding of what is needed in our Canberra community.
Informed by commissioning practices, evidence, and learnings from across Australia and internationally, the government and the non-government sector worked together to develop the commissioning approach for the ACT.
Sector sustainability
In 2020, the ACT Government committed to a strategic review of community sector sustainability, to better understand the costs involved in delivering community services and the cost pressures experienced by community sector organisations in the ACT.
The ACT Government partnered with the ACT Council of Social Service Inc (ACTCOSS) to deliver the review, and the University of NSW (UNSW) Social Policy Research Centre was contracted to undertake the research. The research was funded by the ACT Government along with a contribution from the Community Sector Levy Fund. The work was overseen by the Industry Strategy Steering Group, a subcommittee of the Joint Community Government Reference Group (JCGRG). The steering group comprised representatives from both Government, NGOs and NFPs.
Counting the Costs: Sustainable funding for the ACT community services sector Report was launched on 11 February 2022.
The Report made 6 recommendations to support community sector sustainability. In a firm commitment to working in partnership with the community sector on our shared responsibility of sector sustainability, the ACT Government agrees to 1 recommendation and agrees in principle to the other 5 recommendations.
To implement these recommendations, the ACT Government proposes to move& in stages to a sustainable resourcing and relationship model with the community sector in the ACT.
First, we will co-design a Sector Sustainability Program with the community sector following the $395,000 investment announced in the 2022-23 mid-year ACT Budget. We will provide updates and opportunities to engage with this work.
Second, we have updated the formula to calculate the Community Sector Indexation Rate and will apply it consistently across funding for the whole human services sector from the 2023-24 ACT Budget.
Third, we will develop ACT Budget business cases for new sustainable approaches identified by codesigning the SSP that require additional funding to propose to 2024-25 to 2026-27 ACT Budgets.
Fourth, commissioning of sub-sectors and funding streams is ongoing to identify and address gaps and challenges to meet the needs of people that use those services.
This plan champions a new way forward for the relationship between the ACT Government and the community sector. Together we can identify the challenges, underlying barriers and relevant levers to address sustainability.
Read Counting the Costs: Sustainable funding for the ACT community services sector
Read the ACT Government Response to the Counting the Costs Report
Outcomes
By 2030 Commissioning will transform our human services system and the relationships, services, and programs within it to:
- Better respond to community need, both existing and emerging, through increased flexibility and opportunities for innovation.
- Improve integration across the service systems to support seamless and holistic care, and transitions between services.
- Reduce pressure on our hospitals and other crisis services, such as homelessness or statutory services for children, young people, and families, by prioritising prevention and early support.
- Improve equity in health and life outcomes for priority population groups, through commissioning decisions made about where and how to focus support.
- Improve sector sustainability through closer partnerships and better understanding the needs of our service delivery partners.
Progress
In the first 18 months of commissioning to December 2022, we can see progress towards these outcomes:
- We are consistently assessing community need across multiple services and programs
- We have started improving the links between services and programs
- We are designing more services and programs around early intervention
- We have commissioned peak advocacy organisations to ensuring commissioning drives health and wellbeing outcomes for priority population groups
- We have begun addressing sector sustainability with longer agreements
Commissioning progress is further outlined in the 2022-2024 Commissioning Roadmap release address by the ACT Minister for Community Services.
Drivers
We are undertaking human service reform because in 2021 we – government and the non-government sector – acknowledged that:
- our current funding practices lack flexibility to respond to community needs
- investment in service provision has primarily been skewed towards provision of crisis services rather than services providing early support
- prevention and early support can reduce crisis service demand and provide better outcomes for people
- sector partners and people with lived experience have valuable insights and expertise to inform service and system design
- where we have worked together to identify needs and gaps and design solutions, people have better outcomes.
Page updated: 02 May 2025
