Find My Way will be a free online service available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It will display available homelessness services including accommodation options and connect people to service providers across WA. It will help people experiencing or at risk of homelessness to enquire about accommodation and available support services. Find My Way will also give users somewhere to store and manage important information. Users can choose who to share their information with. For Find My Way users who are rough sleeping or experiencing primary homelessness and are not already connected to a homelessness support service, Find My Way will direct them to a Homelessness Services Connector who will be able to assist with referrals and other support.
Project Status
Find My Way is a strategic initiative to establish a No Wrong Door approach to service delivery and to make it easier for people who are experiencing homelessness to access help and support.
During the first half of 2020, the Department of Communities (Communities) engaged the Centre for Social Impact to complete a six-month co-design process with the homelessness sector. The team defined a No Wrong Door approach to homelessness service delivery and developed an overview of the features required within an Online Homelessness Services Portal to enable this approach.
In late 2021, Communities awarded the contract for the development of Find My Way to Infoxchange, in partnership with Anglicare WA, the Innovation Unit and Anthologie.
Throughout the development and design phases of Find My Way there has been extensive consultation with service providers and service users, including the Lived Experience Advisory Group and a project design team made up of sector representatives. More broadly a series of online and in person workshops have been open to the homelessness sector to view and provide feedback on Find My Way’s design and discuss how the integration with the Specialist Homelessness Information Platform (SHIP) will work.
The input from the sector and those with lived experience has been invaluable and has greatly enhanced the final design of “Find My Way”.
The functionality of Find My Way for people who are rough sleeping or experiencing primary homelessness has been improved with the addition of a Homelessness Services Connector who will be able to assist with referrals and other support. Centrecare’s Entrypoint has been funded to provide Homelessness Services Connectors and this function will provide more equitable access to homelessness services for people who are not connected to existing services, such as those living in areas with few services or those who may not know about or feel comfortable accessing mainstream services such as Engagement Hubs.
Find My Way is currently in User Acceptance Testing (UAT) phase to ensure the system operates as intended. This is expected to be completed by December 2024.
The consortium partner, Anglicare WA is responsible for leading training sessions and demonstrating aspects of Find My Way and SHIP enhancements to the sector.
Training manuals are currently being prepared along with a webinar series that will be communicated to the sector in December 2024. Anglicare WA will conduct online Q&A sessions for the sector in the two weeks leading up to the Go Live date. Anglicare WA will be in contact with the sector directly to provide further information on training.
Background
As part of All Paths Lead to a Home: Western Australia’s 10-year Strategy on Homelessness 2020-2030, the Department of Communities is developing an Online Homelessness Services Portal that will make it easier for people who are experiencing homelessness to access accommodation and other services in Western Australia.
Find My Way will maintain real time data on services and support across a wide range of service providers and will be a tool for people to securely manage and share their own confidential information. Find My Way will support improved referral pathways to secure the most effective response, and make it quicker and easier to support people who are experiencing, or at risk of homelessness.
Find My Way is crucial infrastructure for a No Wrong Door approach to service delivery. Consistent with the No Wrong Door blueprint, Find My Way will introduce two information technology platforms: a Digital ‘Front Door’ and a One Story Database, incorporating agreed assessment and referral protocols.
Planning for Find My Way commenced late in 2019; with the announcement of In State Government funding for the design and development of an Online Homelessness Services Portal.
During the first half of 2020, the Department of Communities engaged the Centre for Social Impact to complete a six-month co-design process with the homelessness sector. The team defined what a No Wrong Door approach to homelessness service delivery looks like and developed an overview of the features required within an Online Homelessness Services Portal to enable this approach.
In 2021, a consortium led by Infoxchange and including Anglicare WA, the Innovation Unit and Anthologie was awarded the contract through a Communities initiated procurement process to deliver Find My Way.
The Innovation Unit, as a member of the consortium project team responsible for engaging stakeholders in design activities has conducted extensive sustained consultation with the sector through interviews, workshops and events that have informed the design and operation of Find My Way to meet the needs of services.
A Lived Experience Advisory Group has been established made up of eight individuals who have come on board to share their experiences of seeking accommodation to help shape and inform the design and functional aspects of Find My Way. In addition, Aboriginal people who have lived experience of homelessness have also provided their voices in the design of Find My Way.
Alongside the one-off consultation activities, the project has also retained a consistent group of members for the duration of Find My Way design and build, representing all key stakeholder groups for the project. This ‘design team’ includes service provider representatives from Wungening Aboriginal Corporation, St Vincent de Paul, and Broome Youth and Family Hub, who were selected from 30 expressions of interest received. The Department of Communities, Lived Experience Representatives, and the project team have also been involved in Find My Way design and development process including testing prototypes.
For feedback and enquiries about Find My Way please contact the Office of Homelessness at the Department of Communities at homelessness@communities.wa.gov.au.
