Webinar on NDIS- Self-Management and creating a good life

Transcript Webinar Two self-management and creating a good life

NOT ON THE VIDEO

Our journey with NDIS self‑management, me and my son, Isaac. This is Isaac. He's 23 years old, he's a delivery man. He's a house mate. He's a friend. He's a gym member and a Canberra Raiders fan and he has a very complex disability. I don't like to introduce him from the stand point of his disability first but just so you know, he's not able to speak. He has ADHD, he has sensory processing disorder. He has some challenging behaviours and a number of other things. His disability is quite severe and quite complicated. He's been an NDIS participant since 2016. So we've had about five plans I think now. Introducing me, I'm 55. I'm a former teacher and an IT business analyst. I'm now a small business owner and I own my own small business called the Good Life Builders, and you've already heard a little bit about that. I'm young of two young man. Isaac is my youngest son and Ben is 26 and he's a primary schoolteacher. I'm very proud of both of them. I grew up in country New South Wales and my father was a post master and my mother was a nurse. I lived in the UK for about nine years, which is where my children were both born and I'm now living in Canberra. I've been a self‑manager right from day one. I was nervous, scared, worried about what it would be like but I just did it anyway and I'm glad I did.

‑ We all need to have goals for our NDIS plan because that helps us then figure out what support we need and then that helps figure out how much money they need to give us. The goals of Isaac's plan have evolved. They've really been around goals that would be appropriate for a person without a disability at the same age. So I always begin with what do other people Isaac's age do and support does he need to be able to do that too? I don't start with fixing his disability; I start with in terms of therapies and things, we do get therapies but my starting point is always what do other people do without a disability that are the same age? In 2016 when he was about 16 to 18 we worked on friendships, work experience and communication. Then when he was getting close to leaving school we continued to work on friendships, work experience and communication. Then after he left school, we looked at work and also a university experience for him and continued with communication and friendships. Then we started looking at moving out of home and independent skills and continued with the communication and friendships. Then looking at in his own place, looking at finding a way of having him own his own house and safeguarding all of the vision and making sure that he's living this good life that we want. If I should get hit by a bus, so making sure that all of that is processes in place to make sure that's all okay. Living independently so we are developing his skills around being a good house mate, doing chores and having good relationships with neighbours and continuing with the communication. You can kind of see how that kind of looks like an ordinary life for a person the same age. I imagine when he's in his 30s we'll be looking at intimate relationships and maybe some more learning. If he was in his 60s we'd be looking at what other 60 year olds do and maybe getting a caravan and go around Australia. I don't know. You get the idea. There's varying complexity of self‑management. So you get some people on the left side here that self-manage part of their plan, the plan is very small and they just use providers. So it's very, very simple. They just get an invoice from a provider who provides the service and they pay it and they get to choose their own providers. I'm down the other end where I manage everything. Isaac's got a very big plan; it is over $400,000. I directly employ staff and I use a bookkeeper. What I'll be sharing with you today is down the more complicated end just so that you can see what's possible but it doesn't have to be that way. Don't feel that if you can't do what I do that you can't self-manage because that just isn't true. It can be quite simple as well. This is the way we've got our whole kind of team set up. You can see above the blue line we have ourselves and Isaac has a microboard and that's a group of family and friends who have formed an incorporated association around Isaac called Isaac's band of brothers and sisters. They are the employers and they help me figure out goals and make sure that we manage any risks and the financials. They own the vision and help me with the 12 month goals. Then underneath that we've got a team leader, a bookkeeper and about four team members who are support staff. The bookkeeper's responsible for doing the payroll and the financial record keeping of Isaac's plan. All I do is claim and pay. I have a little saying that is I only do what only I can do. So I try to outsource as much of the work as possible and only do what I have to do. I have a team leader who manages any issues and rostering and making sure the staff are happy and well trained and we're compliant with insurances and all that sort of stuff. The team do the daily support and they do projects as well, so it's not just face‑to‑face stuff. I pay them a couple of hours a week administration where they go away and they might do a bit of research around Isaac's delivery business, who else we could work for and finding clients and investigating new methods of communication and that sort of stuff. They can go away and do those little projects as well. That's kind of how we have the team set up. They do some reports to me using a system called Podio which I will talk to you a little bit later. The team leader gives reports to the board and does the bookkeeper. We know we're all on track. That's kind of how we set it up. Don't let that overwhelm you. You don't have to have that to be a self-manager. It's just as I said we're on the more complex end. It can be much more simple than that. How we do the financial management? Microboard is the employer. They hire the staff. The staff then provide supports in accordance with his plan. Microboard then invoices myself and my husband, who are the nominees for Isaac's plan. We'll claim it from the NDIS. I'll pay it into Isaac's NDIS bank account and then we pay microboard for the services. So that's how the financial management works. The microboard does not have access to Isaac's NDIS bank account and we are very clear about that with the NDIS. Then the microboard will pay the staff the money we have sent them on the invoice. The challenges that I've faced being a self-manager and having talked with other families I have learnt these things is that if you approach this with a mindset of fear, powerlessness and scarcity of funds that we have all been through in the past then it isn't going to work, you're going to be fearful of buying stuff and getting the supports you need. So you've got to be really positive around your mind set around making sure that you advocate for your family member and don't buy into all of that, `We've got to be begging for stuff.' It's about what you need. Another thing is falling into the managing and doing part rather than leading and governing. So you can end up being in the weeds a lot if you're not careful. Only do what only you can do and try to outsource everything else to the team. That doesn't mean that you completely abdicate your responsibilities; you don't. You just oversee and govern them. You check in but you're not doing all of the work otherwise I found it to be overwhelming. Deciding on what to spend money on can be an issue for people. That I think stems from the planning process. If you go into a planning meeting just knowing your goals and that's it; you haven't thought about how are you going to achieve your goals, what kind of support you need to achieve those goals and how many hours of support you're going to need to achieve those goals, you're going to get this plan back from the planners that doesn't make sense and you're going to be going what do I spend it on? Really thinking very thoroughly on what goals am I trying to achieve, what supports do I need, how many hours and what might that cost is going to help you hit the ground running when you get your plan. Keeping records is also important, keeping your receipts, making sure that the NDIA call you up and say hey what did you spend this on, you can immediately grab the receipt. Keeping to the budget that you've got. You've got to make sure that you keep your eye on how much you're spending and making sure you don't end up with no money and not being able to pay your staff is really important. Implementing strategies to achieve your goals, so making sure that you know what your goals are and how you're going to get there and then figuring out how to get started. I think a lot of people can sometimes struggle with that. They get their plan and it sits there for a few months before you kind of get going. Reporting to the NDIA on achievements and going back for your next plan and making sure that you've got the evidence that things are working. They're the main things that I've discovered that can be tricky. I've figured out ways and you will too. Deciding what to spend money on. Like I said, know your goals, how you'll achieve them and what it will cost before your planning review. Then you can hit the ground running when you get your plan. That will help you decide what to spend funding on. Also use the questions on the self-managers guide to decide if what you want to spend on is reasonable and necessary. There is no list of what you can and cannot as a self-manager there's no list of what you can and can't spend it on. This is really annoying when you get on Facebook groups and people say can I buy this, can I buy that? People go no that's not disability specific, you can't have that. That's not necessarily true because it's about justifying that your purchase against the criteria ‑ and only you know the situation and only you know why it's reasonable and necessary for you. I'd avoid asking the NDIA because you'll never get a straight answer or just a no, no, no. That's their go to answer. It's not up to them. You're all equal underneath the NDIS act, so confident in your decisions and make sure you use that self-managers guide questions to justify your answers. You won't be shot at dawn if you make a mistake either. I've been audited by the NDIA and I was able to produce my receipts and I was also able to produce my reasoning, because I've written down why I thought I needed to buy these particular items. They agreed with some of them. They said, `We can see why you've gone ahead with that and we can see you've made the effort to justify that and that's great, but I'd like to ask that you don't spend money on that again.' I didn't have self‑management taken away from me, I didn't have to pay it back or anything like that. Please don't be afraid. What the NDIA is mostly concerned about is people taking people's NDIS money and going on a six‑month holiday to Florida, not that you can do that these days. That is real fraud, but making mistakes about things that may not be reasonable and necessary, you'll be fine. Do that justification. This is a self-manager’s guide. You will find it on the NDIS website. It's your Bible. Just stick to that and don't listen to anything else that anybody else tells you is my advice. Here's the kind of document that I put together, a little spreadsheet. Every time I go to an NDIS planning meeting, I figure out my goals, what my strategy is. Then I use the price catalogue on the NDIS website to price it all up myself. That might not be your thing and I get that, but if you can just come up with your goal and how you're going to do this and the number of hours you need that will help. If you don't, the planner will do it for you and you will get a crappy little plan with not enough money. It is highly likely that will happen because they will make it up and they will get it wrong. If you can really show them what you want to do, how you're going to do it and the type and number of hours of support. If you can have reports from therapists and doctors and things to back that up, you should be okay. The supports Isaac has in place plan, I have a directly employed team of supports, he does personal training, has a linen service which I go to a provider for, has AAC, alternative communication devices. We do a lot of training, so training for myself and Isaac's microboard and for his staff. That's kind of what Isaac's plan looks like. I think another thing that I wanted to emphasise is making sure that you have your vision very clear about what you want to do, what a good life looks like because having that vision gives your team direction, gives yourself direction, helps you make decisions about goals and where you're heading. If you don't have a vision, someone else will sure as heck make one up for you and you mightn't like it. It is really important you say very clearly what a good life looks like for your person. A vision is not really an end goal. It is more like quality criteria that you're seeking to meet that you can tick off. It helps you identify your goals. Here's an example of Isaac's vision for home. His home is his sanctuary where he can relax, surround with the things he loves and be his own man. Home is how he wants it to be and it is safe and interesting. Isaac's house is a typical house in a typical street.  He has space to roam inside and out, near parks to walk and it's away from traffic. It looks and feels like a typical home. He's got permanency of tenancy. He can't be asked to leave. Isaac is the head tenant. He can ask others to leave. Isaac chooses the paid supports he wants. He chooses who he wants to live with. The people he lives with give extra opportunities to him to connect to his community. He has a reciprocal relationship with his house mates. He gives to them, too. Isaac has support to learn to be a good house mate and his house mates have the right supports to live happily and harmoniously. That is our vision for his home. Having a vision for all of his life areas that are important that you're working on at that time is really, really important. It's worth thinking about it, writing it down and sharing it. Budgeting and record keeping, keeping your own records of what you have spent against the budgets and not relying on the NDIS portal is important because it is clunky and hard to use. Regular budget reviews and forecasting if you have enough money. That is what we do every month. Stick to an average monthly spend if you can. Have a contingency budget just in case life turns upside down and if life changes horrendously you can ask for a review. If you can afford it in your NDIS budget, to help you. He has been just such a great help to us because I cannot stand that money management stuff. It drives me insane. Outsource, keeping receipts and all of that sort of stuff if you can. We have a microboard, as I mentioned. The key differences between a microboard and a circle of support, which you may have heard of, are that a circle of support is quite inform and it doesn't have a legal structure. They can tend to fizzle out after a few years. There is no requirement to keep meeting minutes although you probably would. There is no reporting requirements and there is no financial management really whereas a microboard is actually a board like any large, huge organisation would have where you have governance responsibilities and it is quite formal. We have an incorporated association legal structure but you can have a company structure. They tend to last for the lifetime of the person. In Canada where they started some of the microboards over there have been going 30 years and the parents have passed away and the person still has this great group of family and friends around them helping them with their lives. There's a legal requirement to keep minutes and do financial management and do annual reporting. That formality keeps it together and it makes people be committed and it is less likely to fizzle out because of that formality. Isaac's band of brothers and sisters has to be going for about six years now and I've just found their help to be amazing. So it's break time.

‑ It is. Thank you very much Sheree. We've had lots of questions coming in, which is fabulous. Elga has been answering some online on there, typing answers as well. I'm going to read out some of the ones that have come through. We've had one that says I find it difficult to estimate hours when preparing for the plan review. Any tips?

‑ Yeah, I draw up a daily schedule ‑ a weekly schedule of what the week looks like and then map out okay from 9 o'clock to 10 o'clock he could be doing this. It doesn't necessarily mean that he's actually doing it, but you kind of imagine what the ideal week would look like and then colour it all in and count them up and then go from there. In terms of therapies, just ask for the ideal amount. If you want a therapist once a week, ask for that. It's unlikely that you would get that but if you could get a therapist to help you figure out that in terms of how much you want them, that's great. They can help you with that and write a recommendation. Definitely doing out a schedule, an imaginary ideal schedule and counting up those hours and getting your calculator out helps. I hope that answers your question.

‑ Fabulous. Thank you. The next question that we've got here is how has Isaac's plan evolved over time, for example, have you changed your approach to planning over time?

‑ Yeah, I think. There's been some basic principles that I've done every single time and that is never go alone to a planning meeting, I always take a micro board member with me. I've always thought about the goals and how I'm going to implement them and how many hours of support I would need. I've only just started in the last three years actually calculating it up so then when I get the plan I go ah that's about right. The last two years it's been exactly what I asked for, which is really cool. I've always done the planning with the microboard, so asking them this year he's at this age bracket now, what kind of things should we be working on do you think and what kind of strategies could we use? Then I'll ask the team to contribute. I've done that. That's got better and better over the years about our little process about how we go about doing that. We're getting better at identifying goals and strategies and stuff. Something new that I did last time was to take Isaac to the meeting with a support worker so that the planner could meet Isaac in person. He was happy to stay for about 15 minutes and then when he needed to leave, he was able to. It just kind of gave the planner a bit of an understanding of where Isaac's at because when you look at his life, he's working, he's got a house mate, he's got friends, it can seem like he's much more capable than he actually is. I think they're the things that we've done every time with the planning process. We've also tried to involve Isaac and tried to help to communicate what things he likes, using various talking mats and alternative communication tools. It's very difficult but having the microboard involved helps you. They know Isaac too and we know what's important to him as well as for him. We try to include that.

‑ Thank you. I'll just ask one more now and then we'll keep going because we'll have time at the end for some more questions hopefully as well. This one is how do you know what your child will need if you're still trying to figure out the NDIS and your child has just been diagnosed? This person says yes that's me. I'm feeling lost.

‑ Don't worry about how the NDIS works. Just worry about what if my child is 10 years old what do other 10 year olds do? They go to school, they go to birthday parties, they might be playing sport, they might be learning a musical instrument ‑ all of those things. Then just going okay, what would it take to enable my child to do that? Believing in the possibilities, it's very easy to go my child could never play a guitar ‑ and Isaac could never plan anything ‑ but he could still go along to some kind of music group and have some kind of role. He might be handing out stuff or just sitting in the group. We did drumming lessons with him and he'd join in. Don't worry about the machinations of the NDIS; just as long as you can say, `Okay, my child is 5, what other five year olds do is this. We want to do that too. What would it take to enable them to have that?' And talking with therapists around any strategies in terms of therapy can help and how many hours of that kind of support and then let the NDIA figure out the money side of things. One thing, treat it as a learning journey. You may not get it right to start with but just focusing on that ordinary life and how do I get there is your job and leave the rest of the nitty‑gritty to others and eventually you'll get used to it and be a little bit more informed as you go on. You don't need to know everything about everything to start with. You know your child and knowing what other kids of their age do will help you to get started.

‑ Thank you. I think that's great advice. Our participant has responded and said thanks for the advice. We're still getting our head around it all.

‑ It's hard. Good luck.

‑ We might launch back into it if that sounds good and I'll save the rest of the questions for the end.

‑ Finding the right supports can be a built hard sometimes. It's important that you don't accept poor service. You've now got the right to go elsewhere. Before NDIS came to us we had HACC funding so we could only use one service provider and they were absolutely terrible. You don't have to put up with that now. Don't accept poor service. Look around, shop around. A lot of people are terrified of these service agreements. Don't be. They're good for you. They're just an agreement about what will happen and how the service will be delivered and what you can expect. You can negotiate them.  If you're not happy with the service agreement around the charges of late fees and all of that sort of stuff, you can say, `I'm not really happy with that. I'd like this,' and if they won't budge and there is someone else to use, you can do that. Isaac's service providers. He has a linen service, occupational therapist, a speechy, a support coordinator and an SDA, which is a specialist disability accommodation consultant.  I have used some providers. I've shopped around and found some really great ones and I have Isaac's staff that I directly employ. So I pay their tax and their super and I have insurances and the people who does payroll and all that sort of stuff. You don't have to use service providers and you can hire your own team. There's lots of ways you can do that. You can consider advertising for your own staff and have them sign up to a platform like Higher Up or Mabel. You don't have to just go to disability providers. You can advertise widely, find someone and sign them up. There's that middle ground. Employing your own staff. You can work with contractors. They'll have an ABN. I use contractors for short term projects. I employed someone as a contractor to act as a personal employment broker, so they would go around and find opportunities for Isaac to deliver to certain clients. He worked on that for three months and then I said see you later. He did a great job. You need to check with the Australian Taxation Office. They have an employee contractor decision tool on their website because sometimes if you're employing a contractor on the same time each week, ongoing basis they might really be an employee and you might be liable for paying their super and their tax. You really need to check that. You can recruit your own staff, put them on a form or directly employ, which is what I do. Just be mindful that the NDIS rates include the wages plus any costs. Isaac's microboard will look at the end of the pay period, so the staff might have done maybe 200 hours of support, so we multiply the hours of support, times the cost and bill that to the NDIS. Then they will pay us that back and then we pay the wages out of that and we keep the surplus to cover our costs of bookkeeping and payroll systems and that sort of stuff. That's how we do it. Recruitment. Finding the right support staff. Looking at your networks is a great place to start. Who do you already know? Who do your friends know? Asking your friends do you know someone who might be really good for my son or daughter and writing an advert and thinking about your ah advert what is important to the person with a disability. If they need to be calm and quiet and reserved or outgoing and friendly, or whatever. Thinking about what is important to your family member and what is the goal of the role so that you're not just saying I need a support worker for Tuesday afternoons and that's it. If you just ask for that, you're going to get everybody and anybody. You need to be very specific about what you're looking for because you get what you ask for. Promoting the person with a disability as someone that has goals and dreams that they want to achieve rather than someone who is passive and just needs caring is important. Listing desired personal characteristics of the person and their skills and experience. So we're after someone that is really good at relationship building, is really good at teaching, has some experience in teaching, et cetera, depending on the role. Try to recruit outside the disability sector as well as inside. I've got three people out of five in Isaac's team. That's about right that have never worked in disability before and they are awesome. The team leader has worked as a manager of jewellery shops. So he's a really experienced manager. He just is so good with the team of staff and he has really built great relationships and a great team. He is also a dad and he's really great with Isaac and Isaac loves him too. Another one worked in hospitality. She's really good at the customer service sort of stuff. The other one was a construction worker. He's really good at doing man stuff with Isaac, all of the sports and that sort of stuff. They don't have to be trained in disability to be good. Make sure you're putting the adverts for people that you want to attract in the places they're going to hang out. If you're looking for a cooking mentor, maybe taking an advert down to your local farmer's markets, for example, as well as putting them on Seek and Ethical Jobs and all of those other things. We also use the interview process we have a group interview, an individual interview, then we induct the person and will train them up and trial them. That's kind of our recruitment process. It can be a bit of a brave new world for us parents who've never kind of had any experience around managing a team. We can be quite used to support workers just coming and going, they're students and their study timetable changes and they can't work with uni more ‑ that kind of stuff. I couldn't deal with that. I wanted people, because Isaac is living independently from me. He is living in his own place with a house mate who doesn't have a disability and I need people to be there. I don't want to get called away from work to go and have to stay with Isaac. To keep them engaged in the work, they have to be well paid, they need to be mentored, they need to be challenged, promoted, involved, appreciated, listened to, on a mission so they know what their goals are, empowered to do their roles so they know they can make their own decisions if need be and they're only coming to me when they can't quite work out stuff and they're trusted. So I do trust them. I say to them here's a 12 month goal, how are you going to help me achieve that and away they go. Systems and tools that I use. For our bookkeeping and payroll and all of that sort of stuff we use Xero which is really great because it does all your tax, super and leave and all of that so you're not fiddling around with spreadsheets and stuff. It's a really great system. It is about $70 something a month. I use deputy for rostering. That's a great tool because it keeps up with the award wages, so it integrates with the award wages so you're not having to manually update it. That's really cool you can do a lot of what if scenarios. If someone is going away on leave what are we going to do to cover that and how much is that going to cost and is that going to be in budget? That's a really cool feature as well. It has an app that comes on your phone and you can fill in time sheets and leave on your phone. It is nice and easy to use. Systems and tools, team communication. I use Podio which is a system that is used all around the world by all sorts of organisations. Basically you can build anything you like. We have it for managing shift reports, doctors’ appointments, collecting communication samples and analysing the data on whether or not Isaac has improved in his communication ‑ did I say shift reports? Keeping track of Isaac's friendships and how often he is seeing them so we can try to make sure we build on those relationships. We can use it to do anything we like really. I actually build these portals as part of my business. I can talk to you a little bit about that later. For kind of quick messaging stuff about I can't find the keys where are they, that sort of stuff we use WhatsApp. I set up a WhatsApp group. I found that really useful for training as well. We're doing some training around Isaac using his pod book. I make a little video of how to use it. This week we're going to focus on this kind of communication and I make a video and I send it off. Then I get them to bring it back, to send me a message back about what they've been doing. This week we've been focusing on taking the pod everywhere they go so they don't forget to take it with them. We're playing a game called pod goes to. I sent some photos of pod goes to Buckingham Palace, pod goes to Stonehenge, which is when we went overseas with Isaac. Now I want you to send back photos every day of where the pod has been with Isaac. That is a really cool tool. The kind of innovative stuff we have done is Isaac delivers. He has a delivery business. The NDIS pays for the supports to drive him and teach him the skills and he does the rest. He will do all the delivery parts. We're now earning enough money to cover the costs of the car. It's been a great way of helping Isaac meet people by having this valued role as a delivery man and people are missing him, asking his how he is. I get people phoning up and saying I saw Isaac down the shops the other day, I hope he's okay. Also used a perm employment broker to go around shops to find out if they would be interested in him delivering. We have done stuff like we moved out for a weekend before Isaac had his own place we would go away for a weekend and get in supports for the entire weekend. Sometimes we would house sit for two weeks. We'd get in supports to do that. You don't have to send your kids to respite centres. There is another way of doing it where they can be in their own home. We set up a drum club at the university and we used Isaac's NDIS funding to pay for a drum teacher to come and lead the group. Isaac invited lots of university students to come along and join him in the group and he got to meet loads of fun people at the university and he got to go to the refectory and like a university student. Another thing that we do is annual weekend away with the team and the microboard. We get together with another microboard and we get in some speechies and OTs and other professional people to run some training for us and we share the costs. We use our funding for that. You can do all sorts of things. To get any ongoing support with being a self manager, there is loads of stuff out there. Facebook there's a self manager hub and there's a load of capacity building organisations that will help you. Things like CYDA, Imagine More, Valued Lives, Good Life Builders, which is me. I do online training and mentoring and also have a community of people together in a Facebook group help each other, there's Belonging Matters, CRU, Family Advocacy, Allegro Consulting. I partner with them. They are up in Brisbane, another mum, she's awesome. In Western Australia there's Western Australian individual services, they are awesome as well. There's lots and lots of help out there. So questions?

‑ Amazing, thank you Sheree. We've had quite a few comments coming in already saying how helpful this information has been and at least one person who's already requested to join your Facebook page the Good Life Builders.

‑ It's a good idea because there's lots of really great people on there that are really generous and doing amazing stuff and they'll help you.

‑ That's wonderful. Thank you. Lots of thanks and praise coming in.

‑ I'm really glad it was helpful.

‑ It sounds like it's been really helpful judging by the comments that have come in. I've got a couple of questions that we'll run through. How do you calculate paying the microboard? What funding do you ask for?

‑ I don't pay the microboard. They are volunteers. I do have one person on it that I pay and she's the secretary and she does all of that leg work of organising meetings and sending out minutes et cetera and I pay that out of Isaac's core funding. I justified that around maintaining his informal supports because without her, that microboard could easily fall apart and then Isaac's at risk of having nobody ‑ I'm just getting too old for this stuff. That's how I justify that. I don't say anything about a microboard because the NDIA is not really up with to speed with microboards yet. They are in the upper echelons and there’s a lot of funding going out to support microboard organisations but at grassroots down at the planners they don't know what they are yet. I don't say I want money for a microboard. I say I want funding to support the informal supports and this is how I'm going to do it. I want to have someone I can pay to organise gatherings and that sort of stuff. The microboard members are all volunteers. There's myself, my husband, Isaac's brother, a couple of former support workers and a friend from school who's involved.

‑ Brilliant. Thank you. Another question that's come in is if you have more than one child would you establish a microboard for them as individuals or call on the board to support both of them?

‑ That's a great question. I know someone that's got a microboard around a brother and a sister. Ideally you would have separate ones because it's meant to be person centred and if you're splitting it between two but gosh it's hard enough setting up one let alone two. I would start with one around the two of them and see how you go and if you can break it out into two later on. But just start with one. It's too hard trying to get two up and running. Microboards Australia are based in Western Australia. They can support you through the process of creating a microboard. Get on to them. They're really great.

‑ That's fabulous. We've had a couple of questions about working more with you I guess. Can you give a bit of a plug for your Facebook page?

‑ It's the Good Life Builders. I also have a website which is the goodlifebuilders.com.au. At the moment I'm about to release a course on how to set up your own team, how to directly employ. If you're interested you can just get on to that Facebook group and you'll get all the information, all the low down on that there. The idea is that you can read all sorts of information but it's all out there but just information on its own doesn't help. It's all step by step, check lists, have you done this, have you done that, here's how and mentoring to say let's work out this program, that program and support group on the Facebook page where you have people who say here's how I got through that and here's what I'm doing. It's kind of a whole community there happening. Check that out. That's where you'll be able to find out the low down on what's happening and how to get on to the programs and stuff like that.

‑ That sounds great. Thank you very much. I'll note for everybody as well that we've been recording the session and we'll have the video up on our website as well which will have the slides in it as well. If it's okay with you Sheree, maybe we can circulate the slides.

‑ That is fine. Thank you for the opportunity to share my experiences and Isaac's experience. It's been great.

‑ Thank you so much for being part of it. We've had lots and lots of comments come in saying how useful the information has been so we really appreciate it

‑ That is really great. I'm really pleased to be able to help other people. That's what I want to do because I know how hard it can be. I don't want people having to go through all of that trial and error and angst. If I can help people to make the journey a bit smoother I will do whatever I can.

‑ Thank you very much. It sounds like it has been incredibly helpful for a lot of people. Lots of people have written in saying helpful. Thank you from the CYDA team as well

‑ Thank you CYDA team.

‑ We might leave it there then. Thank you to everybody who has joined us from across the country as well. We really appreciate your time this morning. We will be sending out resources to everybody who has registered as well.

‑ Okay. Awesome

‑ Thanks everyone. Take care. Bye.

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