Social Work Spotlight - Episode 137: Rachel

Episode Date: June 6, 2025

In this episode I speak with Rachel, the Principal Accredited Social Worker and Founder of Lighting Your Way Social Wellbeing, a practice she built to be a safe, inclusive, and neuroaffirming service for people who often fall through the gaps. Alongside working directly with clients, she actively advocates for systemic reform by feeding back injustices and gaps in services to policymakers, as a person with lived experience of disability. Links to resources mentioned in this week’s episode:Rachel’s business Lighting Your Way Social Wellbeing - https://www.lywsocialwellbeing.com.au/DivergAntz Collective education - https://divergantz.com.au/educationEmily Hammond’s NeuroWild - https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/store/emily-hammond-neurowildOnwards and Upwards Psychology - https://www.onwardsandupwardspsychology.com.au/This episode's transcript can be viewed here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1B-pVqgwmufLs5BMfHDT83gMkvMIW4yuyCkAIijryw-s/edit?usp=sharingThanks to Kevin Macleod of incompetech.com for our theme music.

I begin today by acknowledging the Gadigal people of the Eura Nation, traditional custodians of the land on which I record this podcast, and pay my respects to their elders past and present. I extend that respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people listening today. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have an intrinsic connection to this land and have cared for country for over 60,000 years, with their way of life having been devastated by colonisation. Hi and welcome to Social Work Spotlight where I showcase different areas of the profession each episode.

I'm your host, Yasamine Lupus, and today's guest is Rachel, the principal accredited social worker and founder of Lighting Your Way social well-being, a practice she built to be a safe, inclusive, and neuro-affirming service, the people who often fall through the gaps. Alongside working directly with clients, she actively advocates for systemic reform by feeding back injustices and gaps in services to policymakers as a person with lived experience of disability. At the heart of everything Rachel does is a genuine care for people, a commitment to empowerment and a belief that everyone deserves support that recognises their strengths, dignity and unique journey. Thanks so much, Rachel. Lovely to meet with you today and thank you for coming

on to the podcast. Yes, you too. I'm so excited. I'm really looking forward to it actually. I'll have a good chat. As a good social worker would, yeah. Yes. Tell me when you first got started in social work and what brought you to the profession? So officially I graduated in 2018, 2019. Took me, oh gosh, a lot longer than it should have to finish my degree. I guess the reason I got into social work to start with, it all kind of ties in a little bit. But I've got disability and lived experience of trauma myself.

so that the stuff that was going on in my personal world was impacting my ability to finish the official degree as it does. So it just took me a little bit longer. I ended up having like five or six major operations while I was trying to finish my bachelor's. So yeah, it just took a bit longer, but that's okay. It's all part of the experience, I guess. And yeah, that kind of all ties in as to why I got into it.

I had a bit of a challenging upbringing. a lot of mental health, a lot of experience with narcissism and, yeah, just vacant parents and whatnot. I informally had care of my brothers at different points. And yeah, it was a bit of a ride. But that's all kind of contributed then to me as a practitioner now. As hard as all of that was, I'm kind of grateful now because it's helped me build my practice, which is beneficial in a way, kind of using the negatives to build a positive.

And when I first graduated, I actually graduated and went straight into child protection, which is I know a lot of people's journeys. I kind of always wanted to become a child safety officer. That was always my goal. Even at uni, I was like, yep, I'm going to get into child safety. That's what I want to do. And yeah, I went straight into a placement. I worked in the investigation and assessment team in child safety for, gosh, it was like four or five years I worked in that space for. And yeah, that was kind of my beginning of my journey, as I call it, my little baby social work journey.

That's how I, where I started growing as a practitioner and, you know, child protection, as a lot of people know it, it comes with its challenges. But I learned so much, so much that's foundational to my practice even today. So, yeah, it's kind of a little snippet of my story anyway. Yeah. And did that placement experience feed straight into where you started working once you graduated? Yeah, so my first placement was I was working in the community hubs. So that primarily works with refugee and asylum seekers families in the community. So I was out in Woodridge, in Logan, in Queensland doing that.

And then my second placement, yeah, was in child protection. And I kind of went against every way that I naturally interact with people and went to the manager and said, I would like a job at the end of this. And it was the most terrifying conversation of my life. But she was like, yeah, okay. Yeah. And yeah, that was, I went straight. I think I had a week off in between my placement and starting. So, well, straight into it. Hit the ground running. Yeah. Yeah. And look, I think that employers that take on social work students are also looking at projected career paths. They are thinking,

is this person someone that we're interested in employing? Do they have, I mean, they've already, you've built the skills, you understand the placement context. Therefore, you'd probably slide right in faster than someone who perhaps had many years of experience beyond study. So I think, yeah, definitely employers are looking to take someone on placement who might be a good fit. It doesn't always work. And especially if it's the first placement, it's not a guaranteed thing. But it is a common thing. And I guess you'd been able to demonstrate within that your interest and your passion for the area, which was really strong. Absolutely. And it kind of has been the foundation of me figuring out my why and my the who what when where and why of me as a practitioner because whilst you know

I guess a lot of us as practitioners we know what our why is in the core you can't really articulate it until you do some of that unpacking and processing work so I couldn't have told you when I graduated what my why was it took yeah it took a little while of really good supervision and just unpacking what is it like what what is my purpose of doing this because it's not your standard job, social work. So just trying to figure out why and the purpose of everything that I do. So, yeah, I think that's a really important piece of work. Yeah.

Have you been able to use the skills from the first placement, the learning from the refugee context in any of the work that you're doing now? Yeah, I think transferable skills, for sure. It was a non-government organisation. They had very limited funding and my supervisor from then, I still, there's so much that I learnt from her that I use in my practice now. Whilst I don't work directly only with refugee and asylum seeker families, the creative ways that she would work within really broken systems I've used even now.

And it's actually interesting because she wasn't even a social worker. She was education background, but she was the most social worky teacher I'd ever met my life and she was just yeah one of those loose unit supervisors you had a lot of flexibility yes a lot of flexibility and a lot of learning yeah and was it difficult going from your placement to working for the same agency were the expectations very different and did you find that you still had opportunity to grow yeah within reason like I think you know it's no secret that the child safety system And specifically, I worked in Queensland Child Safety, so it's no secret that they're very underfunded, as a lot of those agencies are. So the ability to do professional development and whatnot, it was a lot of the time not hindered.

I don't want to kind of say that they prevented growth, but the work had to be the priority. And a lot of the times they needed you in the office. So you couldn't go off and do training. You couldn't. And they didn't have the funding to pay for professional development a lot of the time. and so it was you kind of covering it yourself and then figuring out when you had time to do it. But within that, the in field work, gosh, my ability to have challenging conversations with people, I probably would have never learnt outside of that realm.

Like every day we were having some really awful hard conversations with families, especially in that investigation and assessment space because it's that first knock on the door and you're having to build rapport so quickly and you're coming in and you're fundamentally breaking family systems if it comes to that when you're having to do removals. And then from that, you are then having to still build rapport with these parents that you've removed their kids from. Like it's skills that you wouldn't learn in another role

because it's very specific to that work. So that development and the development of being able to interview, you and work with children and work collaboratively in really high risk, high, like fast-paced situations. It's stuff that I still, again, I still use fundamentally in my practice every single day. So how did you know it was time to move on? I feel like as your first role, that decision is really difficult. Oh my gosh, it was so hard. And I still even, we talk about that like fomo that you get when you leave a role that is really intense. And we talked a lot in child protection about the adrenaline addiction that you get working in that space. It took me a while

to come away from that and go, oh, okay, I don't have to constantly be on the go. Like, it's okay for me to just stop and slow down and do some really therapeutic work with people. But ultimately, what made me decide to leave was I went and had a baby. I had my first baby and I had no intention of leaving. I had every intention of taking my 12 months and coming back. But then, opportunities. I was on leave and I explored that and I took a very scary leap into private practice. And that's where I am now. So, yeah, it's terrifying. But the best decision I ever made, best decision.

Yeah. And you work with other people, right? So you're not on your own. Yeah. So I have a team now. I started off as a sole trader. So it was just me and I worked with some support coordinators that I knew in the NDIS space. So that was kind of how I got into that.

But support coordination and social work is very different. So learning about my role and what was within my scope, there was a lot of learning and supervision and professional development that I did while I was on Mat leave. So a lot of the time I'd have my son just bouncing on my leg while I'm doing like webinars on, you know, learning about what it is that we can do in this space. And I think it just kind of set a bit of a fire for me. I don't know.

It sounds really cliche, but it's kind of, I've, found a big gap in the systems and was able to kind of fulfill and do the work that I wanted to do in child protection that I couldn't do because of all the red tape and the funding restraints and the wild overcapacity that they've got. And I really could find a gap in doing that like early intervention prevention work. And that's the stuff that we're doing and loving and seeing some really cool wins and progress with. So yeah, very passionate about it now. Yeah, nice. Completely different funding model though, right? Yeah, totally different. I mean, we had crossovers with NDIS in the child protection space.

Obviously, there was kids on NDIS. So I had some awareness, I guess, of it. Like, I was familiar with it, but I didn't know the ins and outs of it, how it worked, how the functioning of it was. In different language. God, yeah, yeah. But then on that same point, it's kind of similar. Like, it all translate, transfers. So everyone talks in acronyms. Everyone's got their own set of acronyms. Everyone's got, you know, the red tape when working with big agencies. So I've actually found it less restricting working in private practice because really it's up to us what we want to do and, you know, advocating for people and doing some of those really big advocacy pieces of work you can do because there's not really anything limiting you from

doing that. So that's been really cool too. Yeah, nice. My understanding of working in private practice, at least as a social worker, is you've kind of got to find a niche. So what have you found as your practice focus, I guess? What are you hoping to specialize in? So our primary specialty area is neurodivergence. So we are a foundationally neuroaffirming lived experience practice.

So if you had to ask me when I very first started, could not have told you. Could not have told you what my niche was going to be. It was a massive learning for me of, you know, what are my skill sets and what are the things that I'm passionate about and where can we make the most difference, I guess? And so because I've got the lived experience of neurodivergence and disability, I wanted to somehow try and feed that in because lived experience is so underestimated, I guess. Like, it's not, I know a lot of people are kind of etching towards the lived experience model now, but it's not as recognized as it should be.

amount of therapeutic growth that I've been able to have with some clients and participants because of the lived experience and the ability to go, yeah, here's my experience of that and then for them to go, oh, you're actually a human. That's that relatability and that human factor is, yeah, something you can't, you can't teach that. Yeah. So that's been, yeah. But the, the niche area kind of ties then into, so it's neurodivergent neuroaffirming, lived experience model, but really specialising in those high-risk, really vulnerable participants and clients. So people living with disabilities that are at risk of or are currently involved in the child protection system. So really doing some of that prevention work.

And then advocating within the system as well, given myself and my team have a lot of knowledge of how the system works. Families wrapped up within the family court system because there's a whole other rabbit hole of how the family court system is not set up for neurodiver. And another big one for us is housing and homelessness. So we've got a lot of clients and participants that we work with that were either currently homeless when they were referred to us or at risk of. So that's been another very large piece of work that we've been doing. And is your practice made up of just social workers? At the moment.

So we've got three social workers and an admin and finance officer. But I am looking at incorporating some sort of neuro-affirming support work. support so where the support workers are supervised by social workers and they provide remote support for our participants so not something that I've done yet but it's in it's in the works yeah nice and I feel like that admin finance side of things you've got to know what your strengths are right and you've got to know hang on a minute this is not my strength this is something I need someone else to help with not my strength so not my strength and she is a whiz so she and because I'm neurodivergent she will like book meeting for me, remind me and prompt me when I've got things that I need to follow up with.

And not in a way of like, you don't know what you're doing, but hey, Rach, remember you've got this coming up or, you know, I've booked this meeting room for you. It's, yeah, it's just such, take such a load off my own executive dysfunction. So very, very grateful for her. Yeah, nice. What would you say, I know in social work there are no typical days, but what would you say an average day looks like for you? What are you involved in day to day?

Well, for me versus my team, it probably looks a bit different. So I can probably give you like two sides to that coin because my team are very much, there are a lot more out in the community doing the visits and doing that real hands-on work, whereas strategically I've kind of shifted away from that so I can put more energy into building the business and building the practice and doing some of that really good work that I love doing. And I have exclusively only therapy clients, so I only do telehealth. at the moment. Just that way, I don't have a lot of that ad hoc stuff coming up on the crisisy stuff that's more that sits with my team and they're very, very skilled at it, which is good. So a typical day for myself, you know, we come in, we have our team, we call it team roundups in the morning. So we get together, talk about what everyone's doing that day. I will then often have my pit of emails that I have to get through, which is always fun. And then I do a lot of networking and reaching out to other providers. At the moment, I am planning and putting together a community fundraiser event to raise funds for Amity Place, which is a domestic violence service

that runs off donations. And they're doing some really incredible work in the domestic violence and family court space. So yeah, my day's change. Also supervising my team. So we have our regular catch-ups, making sure that I'm supporting them the best way that I can. and then, you know, my own supervision as well, I get external supervision. So, yeah, my days are, they look a bit different to my team. Average day for one of my team members, gosh, you're right, there is no average day in social work. It can vary, it could be going out and facilitating a meeting with housing.

It could be attending complex care coordination group meetings to advocate for immediate housing relief. It could be doing some like foundational scaffolding supports, so helping develop some strategies and tools like routines or visual guides to help prompt some of our participants through some of their, where their areas of needs are. So, you know, like routine prompting or getting them the resources that they need to achieve their own goals. Family meetings, stakeholder meetings. Yeah, it's so vast and varied. So kind of changes each day. Yeah, I think what strikes me most is the variation that's within that. So each of the people on your staff need to wear many hats. They need to have so many tabs open at once and just kind of keep everything running in the

background smoothly and coordinate things throughout their day. But the Pollyanna in me wants to see that as a positive in terms of they've got so much balance within their work. So they're not spending three hours just focusing on that or they're not spending a whole day writing a report. There might be elements of that, but there is variation within what they do, which makes it interesting. It does. And when you are, you know, building a team around lived experience, my whole team is neurodivergent. So as the principal and the supervisor, it's then my job to make sure that I'm creating a workspace that is affirming for their neurotype. So, As we know, neurodivergence don't like things to be the same every day.

It's boring. So we need some sparkly, shiny things, which is then why I get some, like, cool projecty work and, you know, getting them to design new tools and visuals that we can use within the team. And it just keeps it interesting for them and keeps them enjoying the work, which is really important to me because it means that they're then translating that into being amazing practitioners. So I'm a bit biased. Of course. What do you find the most challenging part, either of the work that you're doing in supporting

families, supporting people with disabilities, working with systems, or, you know, just leading a group of people and running your own business? So the business side of it is challenging because as a social worker, fundamentally I am not business-minded. So I want to take on every single pro bono case that I can and I want to help everyone, which is my own boundary check-in. And I am putting systems in place to make sure that we're still able to provide that support, you know, for people who don't have access to funding or can't access services, really, that we can still support them to then get what they need. So often we'll write biopsychosocial assessments or functional capacity assessments pro bono

because it's a piece of evidence that the NDIS needs you to have, but they won't fund for you to get. And often they're like thousands of dollars. So that part's really frustrating because it's supposed to be an accessible support and it's just not. It is not at all set up for people with disabilities, which sounds so ridiculous

because it's the disability insurance scheme, but whatever. So that part is challenging, trying to kind of, I always picture it like I've got my social work brain and my business brain and often I've got to like switch one off or the other because they fight each other all the time. Yeah. And then the social work part that's challenging is the system stuff.

When you're working within a government organization or, yeah, like those bigger organizations, I think you don't really see how broken they are. Like you know that they're not functional. You know that there's gaps and that there's things that don't work. But until you are fully on the outside of it and you go, oh my God, like this doesn't work. we are constantly fighting and advocating with Department of Housing. They're probably our main one and NDIS. And I think I get really frustrated with it because,

and this is not to blow wind up my team, but as an example, if these clients didn't have a social worker or someone in their space, there's no way that they would be able to navigate this system because often we don't know how to. So how are you expecting someone who is vulnerable or has executive functioning issues or whatever their circumstances are, how are you expecting them to then navigate a system where they have to maintain their own budget,

they have to coordinate their own supports because, you know, NDIS is trying to phase out support coordination. So then what? So it's just, yeah, very frustrating when you can see that it's just so broken and you're just fighting constantly. Yeah. How do you see social work then sitting in this world where those types of roles could be held by OTs, educators, psychologists, what do you think we give to the area?

So often we're having this discussion because, again, and I can only really speak specifically to the work I'm doing right now, and I know it applies across the board, but there is this very much like us versus them mentality in the NDIS space, which is so frustrating because social workers, we want to work collaboratively. It's that whole, why can't everyone just get along? But it's true. It's, you know, why can't we all play to our strengths? So if, you know, if I was to answer that question directly, social workers are so holistic.

We look at the biopsychosocial model. So what are all of the systemic impacts? And how can we fill these gaps of support? Because without a system, there's no safety. You know, there's no security. It's that you're looking at, if we're breaking it right back down, Maslow's hierarchy. It's what are the,

foundational things that you need, whereas a lot of the other service providers amazing are what they do, but they're very specific to what they do. So you know, you've got physios or psychologists and specific they are treating what they're treating in their fields of work, whereas social work, we look at the whole person, the whole world around them. And I think that's the benefit, especially when you're navigating systems that don't work very well. I find sometimes the other scopes of practice can be a bit restricting because a lot of the time they say oh that's not my scope that's not my scope of practice so yeah perhaps traditionally they're a bit more clinical yes yes that is a good way of putting that yeah yeah and i think things are definitely changing i think perhaps

ndIS has been good in that sense that it has tried to create a level playing field and to diversify skills but yeah i definitely think there's a long way to go with that big time and especially having social work recognized in the NDIS. That is a huge piece of work that's going on behind the scenes. There's an amazing working group that's happening. They're working directly with the NDIS. It's like collaborative piece with the AAASW and the NDIS because often what is actually happening is not being listed as a stated support in people's plans. And actually this happened a couple weeks ago. I've been this person's therapist for a year and a half. We have been having fortnightly therapy sessions and the growth has been incredible.

And she was going through a tribunal recently and social work was removed. And psychology was put in. She goes, I don't want to see a psychologist. And that's not anything against psychology. I've just been her therapist and it's been working. So that is a really hard part of working in this space is you feel like you're constantly having to explain what you do. So are you spending just as much time reporting then or writing?

updates and communicating with people as you are doing the actual work. Pretty much, yeah. And, you know, the advocacy pieces. So when I'm networking, instead of just going, hey, I'm a social worker, you know, we've got a cool team out here. It's also here's what social workers do in the NDIS space because, you know, only last week I got an email from a support coordinator saying, oh, could you give me some examples of like what a social worker does and when we would refer to one?

I'm like, this is the prime example, prime example. And again, I know the value of having social workers involved. I've seen it. I've seen what has been able to be achieved and not just within our team. I speak to a lot of other social work providers in this space and the goals that they've been able to achieve have been amazing, you know. It's that us versus them stuff. It's yuck.

And the NDIS doesn't help with that so much right now. Yeah, for sure. Do you find it's, this is probably more of a sense. sensitive question. So answer it as you wish to. But you're all good. I always have discussions with my team around self-disclosure in building rapport and trust with the people that I help. How do you find that is that beneficial? How do you go about it in a way that's appropriate and meaningful? It's interesting. You asked that because of where I have worked previously, it's been a very much like nothing. You don't really self-disclose. I mean, I used to self-disclose little bits, but it was so

general and it was more of a, like, we're quickly trying to build rapport because I'm trying to build trust with you. And you only had the short periods of time. So it was pulling on all of your therapeutic skills. I know that was a point of big contention in the social work world because it's about keeping yourself safe and where's the boundary. What are your boundaries with that? And how do you disclosed safely in the disability space and because we are a lived experience service for myself, I have really good boundaries in how much I disclose. But I'm quite open that I've got a disability that I've had experience with trauma, mental health, drug and alcohol addiction, neurodivergence, because for me, I'm not disclosing any particular details about myself. I'm not talking about my

kids. I'm not talking about where I live. I'm not, it's purely about, yeah, I mean, I've got spina bifeter and this is how it impacts me and I've got another client with spina bifeter and that is the reason that she engaged with a therapist prior to that because she's like they just don't get it and not that I'm saying I understand what she's going through but it's that level of mutual understanding and respect of when she uses spina bifida specific language like around having a mace you know I've got a mace and I've got a chate tube and that's how I access my mace and if I was to say that to someone else they're going to be like, what is that? Whereas she said it to me and I'm like, yeah, I've got it.

Yeah. So I think it's just about, well, having really good supervision, number one, always good supervision. But just there are ways to safely disclose, in my opinion. And I know people will agree, disagree on that. But I think it's just, you know, keeping yourself in check and what is the purpose behind disclosing is always the question, you know. We're not making friends.

It's not a friendship. That's not what this is about. Why are you disclosing? What's the reason? Is there a purpose? Okay, how do we do it safely? And you're not offloading on the person either. Like, you've had a really bad day.

You went to see the doctor and they don't care. I don't care. Sometimes they might, but that is not their weight to hold. So that kind of then suggests to me it's equal amounts personal and cultural. So on one hand, you might feel personal. comfortable disclosing and having that conversation with someone because it's that one-on-one importance. The other is to what degree does your agency or department support that and how much do they understand of why you might do that? Yeah, absolutely. And it's when I am hiring as well,

I am so open from the get-go that we are a lived experience service. This is fundamentally why I have set this up and the way that I've done it. And if you're not comfortable with the way that that functions, that's so okay. That's okay. This obviously isn't the role for you, but yeah, it's actually created a really beautiful team where we're all just really open about what our accommodations are that we need. And, you know, it's great. And it's small. I like a small team. Other than supervision, which is paramount for you, what other support do you need? How do you make this realistic and meaningful and sustainable for you? I mean, look, that's an ongoing learning space. I think forever. Work-life balance is a big one. So I only just got an office space this year. So prior to that,

myself and my other social worker at the time, it was just myself and her. We were working remotely from home. And so then that, you know, brought along a whole world of its own challenges that we had to kind of navigate in how do you shut off at the end of the day? What are the steps that you take? Because you don't get that drive home, which I know a lot of people, I do it now, now that I have an office. So I think work-life balance is a big one. And for me, for example, moving into the office has been a game changer because, well, one, you get that within team debrief where you can just spin around and be like, oh my God, that was a really hard phone call or, you know, what do you think about this? Or do you know any services? Whereas before it was, hey, are you free? Can I call you?

which is fine, but just not as streamlined as it is now. And also the ability to work is in my office and then I go home. In saying that, because I run the practice, I also have to be really careful because I do do work at home. So it's then making sure I'm not working every single night and staying up till God knows what time. Like it's having to keep myself in check with that too because I got two little kids and a husband

and a life outside of my social work world as passionate as I am about it. So I need to make sure that I'm also present in my personal world too. So sorry, I realize I've gone on a big tangent here, but work-life balance, big one. You really haven't. You've brought it back to when you first talked about supporting others while supporting yourself. This was your upbringing. This is what you've done your whole life. And you're really just trying to maintain those good relationships with your team

and make sure that the work that they're doing seems right for them. and that you can do the best job you can of supporting them. That's the goal. That's the goal. And I'm hoping that we're achieving it to some level. So, yeah, it's good. Amazing. And you're still developing.

You're still making changes. You've got other things in the works. But obviously, you're pacing yourself and trying not to make too many changes all the once. Yeah, just slow progress and slow and really being informed by the team's experience, too, because I think that's really important. They're the ones out doing the thing. They're out in the community. Whilst I am doing work with clients, it is significantly reduced compared to them because they hold caseloads.

I can't hold a caseload and run a business. I was and that was anarchy. So I wouldn't recommend that. But it's really about being informed by others, which also is foundationally neuroaffirming in itself because you're being informed by the voices of the people you work with, the people around you. have there been some i know we've talked about some challenges within the space and just within day-to-day work but what's going well are there some positive changes in this area that you've seen over time yeah i think so so within obviously i can only talk within our team we have a windboard that we keep up because it can be really when you're in the trenches and you've got a lot of like crises

driven work happening and it just feels like you are not getting anywhere. We've got a windboard. So whenever anything happens, we're like, oh, put it on the board. And then it gives us a point of reflection. So when things are feeling really crap, you just have a look at your windboard. And we go, actually, look at all this really cool stuff that we did. So we've been able to, in the last 12 months, and I know I'm not going to get this number right, but we've been able to successfully obtain stable housing for seven, six or seven participants that were homeless when they were referred to us. And that was huge, huge pieces of work that went into that. Because as I was saying before, the housing and homelessness sector is not set up for people with disabilities. They

have it posted all over their websites that they are, but when you're in it, it's not. And then kind of to foot in from that, I have a bit of a projecty thing that I'm working on at the moment. I've got a meeting with the housing minister and his senior policy advisors coming up. It was meant to be last month, but some stuff happened that kind of put that on hold. But I'm going in to present lived experience of neurodivergence in the housing and homelessness space and then putting forward recommendations that are being led by voices of our participants. So I've got them to fill out this survey and literally just answer, like, what has your experience been, and talk about where your disability needs being met

and what are some of your suggestions on things that could be different to make it more accommodating. And so I'm going to go and present that and hopefully work a little bit collaboratively with the policy advisors to make, I'm not going to say we're going to change the whole system, obviously, but even just implementing some neuro-affirming training for the housing officers, like just some really basic stuff

to get on the ground changes. So yeah, that's kind of some cool. stuff that's happening. NDIS world's a bit tumultuous at the moment. So like I know there's a lot of funding that's being cut, but what I have also seen if we're going to do a really nice social work reframe is a lot of the good providers are figuring out ways to work collaboratively and creatively within the constraints of these plans, which we probably hadn't seen before. So before specifically you'd be kind of restricted to a therapist would work as a therapist and Bill as a therapist, whereas now it's like, okay, well, what other funding mechanisms can we use?

Are we able to work within a team? And can our social workers train the support workers and then the support workers can do that hands-on work at a significantly lower rate, but they're being supervised by the social workers. Like, that kind of stuff has been really cool to see. I don't know why when you say that I kind of picture a piece of bread in the oven that's expanding and that's kind of in my head, that's the NDIS that's just blown almost out of proportionate. very, very quickly. And now it's had to kind of shrink down a little bit and rest for a bit and figure out, okay, what are we actually? How are these flavors developing? How can people

work together instead of working in silo and just taking on more and more and more because the work is there? 100%. And because the NDIS world is kind of filled with independence. And I mean, we were also an independent at one point. It is hard because unless you're really good at that networking or you're connected with people, you do work in a silo. So another piece of work that our team does is really just pushing that collaborative work. Let's have a stakeholder meeting. Let's get together with the family.

Let's make sure any decisions that are being made are being driven by the participant. Because a lot of the time, prior to this, we were engaging with service providers that were like, oh, we'll get a PBSP on board, a behavior practitioner on board. Okay, have you spoken to the family about that? Oh, no. Okay, so let's have a family meeting and let's do some like supports eco mapping. in, you know, dropping in all these social work terms, but it was really useful. We're able to fill some gaps and work holistically, which again kind of connects back to that original question

you had of, what do you think the value is? And I think that's what it is. And I think perhaps non-social workers might see the number of people that you've supported with housing and go, oh, 12 months, six, seven people. It's not quantitative. It's qualitative. You're looking at the systems around and the number of people that have had to come together at the right time to make that happen is significant. And the flow-on effect of that person, not just having the bricks and mortar of sense of security, somewhere to put things down, somewhere to receive friends or receive services, it's a huge thing. So that's a really big achievement. And we've kind of talked about that within the team of like when you say the number, as you said, it doesn't sound huge.

But, you know, within our team, we know the hours that have gone to that. I could quantitate the hours, literally, because that's the model we work in. But it's crazy, the amount of work that goes into advocating for a very basic need at the moment, because we are in a housing crisis, as everybody knows. So that also presents a whole other level of complexity that, you know, five years ago. go, it looked totally different, totally different. Yeah, and you might have two people who have exactly the same situation or condition or need and the same approach is not going to have the same effect.

So you really need to be able to tailor that. Absolutely. Absolutely. We have that exact example at the moment, actually. So, yeah, it's challenging, but it's really the growth that I've seen within my team as well has been amazing. just I think the ability to have so many different systems and factors and modalities that we have to work within. I can then see the growth from when they very first started.

So that's also been really cool, selfishly. It's about me. I think that windboard is so important because we can get so bogged down in what we're doing and sometimes forget that we're doing good work unless it's got some big outcome. And I'm probably guilty of that as well. It might take one of my team members saying, oh, hey, so-and-so got their driver's license. And I'm like, oh, yeah, so-and-so. My portfolio got their drive.

And you just don't realize. You don't realize how big these things are sometimes because you're too much in the thick of it. And it takes someone else being able to communicate a win for you to be able to see that for your own people that you're supporting. Absolutely. It was something that kind of came out in one of our team meetings that we had. where it was at the start of the year when we'd come into the office space and I said, you know, what do you guys think we could do to make sure that we're prioritising that really positive morale within the team? And that was actually something that the team had suggested.

Because previously across the three of us in our other roles, we'd had like a book within our team that we'd write our positive wins in. But for us, it was like, we need something that we can just see. Like, it's in the office. We only have a small office so everyone can see it. and you just pin a posty note to it and it's all colorful and you really kind of draws your eye in and I often catch myself not realizing that I'm looking at it and going oh that's right so on so got a house like that's amazing so yeah it is handy would recommend yeah are there any other areas of social work I know you are building and developing this real passion area but there is there anything else while you were studying even that you heard about and you thought oh I'd really

like to try that one day yeah I think well an area that I did work in it wasn't officially in a social work capacity because I was still a student but was in the housing and homelessness sector. So I was involved in the startup of a homelessness outreach program. So whether I realized it or not, I think housing and homelessness has kind of been like my area of passion, I say kind of, because I enjoy it, but it's very frustrating. But yeah, I think that's probably to be honest with you when I was at uni I wanted to be in child safety as my career. I wanted to work my way up be a senior prac. That was my goal. So I actually didn't really think of anything else outside of that. To be honest, that was kind of where I thought I'd just stay forever

naively. Well, I mean, to a large extent you have and I think that sort of area you can't get away from as a social worker. So you can be working with asylum seekers. You can be working in housing, you can work at Centrelink and child protection and child safety and family support will come up. Always. Always. Yeah. You've mentioned the housing discussions that you're having with ministerial people, which is really exciting, but are there any other programs or projects that are coming up for you at the moment? We're working on some resource building things for people that they can access from our website and our Facebook page. So they're not up yet, but we're kind of trying to to figure out a way where we can incorporate some of the tools that we use every day that

we've designed as a team to then be able to have accessible for people that are like master copies. So something, one of the people in my team has designed is for our neurodivergent participants. It's based on the spoons theory. So it's the spoons theory check in and it's a bit of a flow chart. And it's like, you know, you wake up in the morning and are you feeling low on energy, yes, you know, do you need to cancel appointments today and like, do you need to reach out? And it's just that taking away from the cognitive load of having to make decisions because when we're low on spoons, it's really hard. And that's where we're finding like the contentious point of overwhelm for a lot of people. So she's designed this amazing. It's the,

I think she called it the spoonie tree, something like that. But she showed me today and it's looking very cool. So it's just stuff like that. We're just trying to make, because not everyone can access our support or supports from us for whatever reason, whatever capacity. So we're just trying to make things accessible for people. So we're doing a bit of brainstorming as a team on how we can do that. And in addition to directing people towards your website when it's fully up and functioning, are there any other resources or even media reading that you'd suggest people have a look at if they wanted to know more about either the work you do or social work in general?

Absolutely. Well, there's a whole bunch specific to, and I think, because the gap in knowledge of neuroaffirming practice is quite big. Like it's not, it's not something that you consistently see. We don't learn it at uni. It's something that you, unless you're working in it, you don't know. So there's a whole bunch of divergence, have some really good resources on their website. Their free training is incredible.

I make my team do it before they start working with me as a foundation training. NeuroWild has some good stuff. Onwards and upwards psychology is amazing. they've got some really good books, but I've got like a whole list of resources. I could share that, probably share them with you too as well. That would be amazing. I can pop them in the show notes, easy, accessible for people. That's really great.

Is there anything else, Rachel, before we finish up, anything that you wanted to mention or anything you wish I'd asked? No, I don't think so. I think that was a very good chat. I like it. Yeah. I mean, it's always easy to talk about what you do, but sometimes it's hard to get into the weeds and step out of your role for a minute and think, yeah, what am I doing here?

What am I actually doing? What is the purpose? Yeah. And you talked about your purpose early on in terms of that interest in child safety and why you got into it and sort of the lived experience impact that that had on your desire to become a social worker in the first place. And you stuck with it, even though it took you a bit longer than you'd hoped it would. Yes.

maybe that helped you formulate and kind of mesh a little bit more in your head that purpose and this is why I want to do it and this has been a tough experience and I can help make things a bit easier for someone else. And then that pivot to private practice is significant. It's a big move even as someone who's fairly new in social work to have gone, you know what, this experience has come up and I'm going to just jump right in and do it and figure it all out and you found those gaps in the system and you're finding a new purpose, I guess, in the new role and the new business. And it's still that early intervention for families with extra support needs, but it's fostering and maintaining that interest for your team as much as it is developing yourself as a

social worker. Absolutely. Oh, and also you're educating external providers around what social work can be and what you bring to this area, how you can be valuable in this space. So there's, there's so much learning from that and so much good work that's still to be done. So yeah, thank you for forging away and getting all that off the ground and we're forward to seeing how it continues to develop. Thank you. And thank you so much for having me. I've really enjoyed this. I do enjoy having a bit of a grassroots social work chat. So thank you. Yeah, it's been my absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks for joining me this week. If you'd like to continue this discussion or ask anything of either myself or Rachel, please visit my anchor page at anchor.fm.fm

slash social work spotlight. You can find me on Facebook, Instagram and Blue Sky, or you can email SW Spotlight Podcast at gmail.com. I'd love to hear from you. Please also let me know if there is a particular topic you'd like discussed, or if you or another person you know would like to be featured on the show. Next episode's guest is Nikki, who has worked throughout the UK, Cape and Torres, and Cairns, with over 20 years experience in Queensland Health and the mental health system. Nikki makes use of a variety of psychotherapies in her practice, including EMDR, having recently finished a graduate diploma in clinical hypnotherapy and strategic psychotherapy. I release a new episode every two weeks. Please subscribe to my podcast so you'll notify

when this next episode is available. See you next time.