This is for providers wanting to to go from supporters paying on behalf of, to participants paying with support

When we talk about capacity building from the perspective of handling money, the goal is always to shift from supporters paying on behalf of participants, to participants paying with support where required.

This means the goal is always about how to safely involve participants in their spending as much as possible, in a way that is safe, secure and sustainably builds their capacity.

So how do we do that, exactly?

Firstly we need to ensure our system can adequately graduate participants from little to no involvement, through to supported, or even independent spending on their own. As a business, it’s really important to consider if your process can do this for participants, but at the same time, ensuring you can still maintain your record keeping and efficient business processes.

This means that you can tick all the boxes you need to as a business in a super fast, easy and efficient way, while still ensuring your participants are involved in that process or system in a meaningful way.

Once you’ve ticked that box it’s all about training. Your support workers need to be the champions here. The good news in they’ll be following a process for your business spending, which if you’re picking the right processes, should be a process your participants can learn too with support.

Now that your support workers are confident, and your participants are integrated in to the same system, your support workers can start supporting the participant to be more involved at check out. This can start with being the one to tap the card and over time, graduate to supported budgeting decisions.

All of this is clearly dependent on the participant using a system that is build for them and their needs.