
Future Directions evaluation
ARTD is leading an evaluation of NSW Family and Community Services’ Future Directions initiatives, in collaboration with Taylor Fry and Social Ventures Australia.
Future Directions is the NSW Government’s new vision for social housing over the next 10 years. It’s an innovative, holistic approach to making real change in social housing. It recognises that people living in social housing do so because of a range of life events and risk factors, and that changing the trajectory of their lives cannot be achieved through a single initiative alone.
Future Directions offers a suite of interconnected and mutually reinforcing strategies and programs, which together aim to affect real change. The Service Improvement Initiatives form part of the programmatic response within the Future Directions Strategy, which is designed to deliver three key objectives:
- More and better-quality social housing
- More opportunities, support and incentives for people to avoid and/or leave social housing
- A better experience for social housing clients.
FACS has commissioned ARTD and its partners, Taylor Fry and Social Ventures Australia, to evaluate the six Service Improvement Initiatives, which are a combination of new initiatives and expansion of others. Over the next three years, we will deliver an evaluation with four main focuses:
- a quasi-experimental comparison of immediate- and long-term outcomes for clients and
- controls
- client pathway case studies
- place-based case studies
- an economic evaluation.
Our evaluation will produce evidence about the most effective initiatives—in isolation and combination—for generating outcomes for people and places with defined risk and protective factor profiles. The resulting evidence base will allow FACS to modify, target or abandon certain interventions for different clients, and ensure clients are at the centre of program design and delivery for Future Directions.