Tell us a bit about yourself.

My name is Jamie-Lee Dwyer and I’m a 34 year old woman living on the Gold Coast. I currently work at the Housing Hub as a copywriting assistant, and as part of that I write a lot of lived experience blogs. I hope to make a difference for other people with disabilities going through similar struggles so they don’t feel alone.

You worked on our project to develop resources to support people with disability living in shared support settings to resolve issues for 18 months. What made you get involved?

I was interested in how collaborative the co-design project would be with people who had different disabilities. I wanted to be a part of something where different perspectives were involved to create something meaningful.

I hope that by using skills that I’ve learnt as well as my unique experiences I can provide support for other people in similar situations to me.

What did you enjoy most about the process?

I enjoyed working alongside people from different backgrounds and seeing what they came up with.

For example, I really enjoyed working with other people who have lived experience and seeing the way they’re able to communicate with assistive technology.

What did you take away from this project?

Better education about NDIS roles and responsibilities and more confidence to navigate this in the future. Personally, I don’t think there is enough education out there about disability and I’m excited to be a part of this project.

What would you say to other people considering getting involved in a co-design project like this?

I would encourage as many people as possible to get involved in a co-design project because it opens your eyes as to what other people may be going through.

What do you think about the final designed resources?

The final resources show how much effort the whole team put into designing them. I think they are very useful and I only wish that I had access to these resources back when I moved into SDA (Specialist Disability Accommodation).

Is there any resource in particular that you would recommend to people thinking of checking them out?

I would recommend the Knowledge Builder: Building the Culture. I think it explains so much about living in SDA and how shared support works as opposed to your personal team of support workers.

Check out the Knowledge Builder and the full set of resources:

Full Resources

While up to 36,000 people will be eligible for Specialist Disability Accommodation (SDA) payments in the next 20 years, little is known about the impact SDA has on the lives of people with disability who live there.

The Summer Foundation and La Trobe University are investigating this across 4 key indicators: health, wellbeing, community integration and paid support needs, through the Home and Living Outcome Framework study.

Early results from the pilot study are already showing large positive effects and significant improvements across all indicators.

Drawing on an initial sample of 15 NDIS participants living in well-located and well-designed SDA, the results of the pilot show that after moving into SDA:

60% had higher overall health
66% had improved wellbeing
73% felt better integrated within the community
21% no longer required overnight support
Participants required 2 hours and 24 minutes less of daily support

These initial outcomes have important implications for policy, and demonstrate that suitable SDA can reduce the cost of support hours required for participants.

For example, the pilot study showed that a person living in single-occupant SDA needing 2.4 hours (2 hours and 24 minutes) less support per day could save the NDIS over $60,000 per person per year.

While yet to be quantified, improvements to health, wellbeing and community integration also have considerable value in terms of savings to be made.

Results like this start to build a rigorous evidence base for the creation of innovative, high-quality and fit-for-purpose SDA.

Are you about to move into SDA? We’re looking for more research participants.

Learn more about the study here, and register to have your say here.

It can be difficult for people living in Specialist Disability Accommodation (SDA) or shared support settings to know who to turn to when experiencing problems.

Just like anyone living with other people, there are roles to negotiate and responsibilities that need to be made clear.

That’s why we’ve co-designed these resources to help NDIS participants know their rights and how to take action when they feel a situation puts their rights or safety at risk.

The Summer Foundation and Housing Hub, through a grant provided by the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission, worked with NDIS participants, providers and supporters to produce the resources which aim to:

Clarify roles and responsibilities in shared support settings and provide information on who to contact if you’re having trouble resolving an issue
Guide NDIS participants with tips for setting up service agreements and having conversations about support with their providers
Provide information on setting up tenant advisory committees and other ways to make sure there is open communication between tenants and housing providers

Check out the resources here and hear from one of our co-design contributors here.

View resources

Hot off the press is this toolkit from the Department of Social Services, designed to be a helpful one-stop-shop source of information for people with disability on moving out of aged care.

The toolkit covers key concerns on the journey out of aged care, and breaks down information on finding housing options, the basics of moving, settling in and ongoing support.

The Summer Foundation helped with the development of this toolkit by coordinating the participation of Lived Experience Contributors who helped to develop and review the material.

These Contributors included younger people who used to live or are still living in aged care, as well as their families.

We would like to thank everyone who contributed their voices and experiences to this resource.

We hope the tips, stories and guides in this toolkit will give people, their family and carers the confidence and knowledge to make choices that work best for them.

Find the toolkit here.

Download toolkit

It’s an exciting year for the Summer Foundation as we work with renewed purpose under our new vision to identify, design and scale up great ideas to deliver better housing and living solutions for people with disability who need access to 24/7 support.

The Summer Foundation is currently exploring four areas with lots of potential. These include:

Flexible and on-call supports: Technology-enabled support that is more flexible and responsive than rosters of care and/or 3-4 hours of scheduled shifts. These may use health and other monitoring technology.

Ecosystem of Housing Innovation: Establishing an ecosystem of universities, designers and developers that are continually innovating to improve the built design of housing to make it more adaptable and functional for people with disability living in Specialised Disability Accommodation (SDA).

Shared Lives: Individualised Living Arrangements (ILAs) including hosts, homeshare, sharehouses, good neighbours, co-residents and mentors where people with disability have a choice about where they live, who they live with and how they receive their supports.

Self-determined lives: Governance models and interventions that enable NDIS participants to direct the services they receive and the workers that deliver their support.

I look forward to keeping you updated on our progress and sharing what we learn along the way.

2025 is also an important year for disability policy reform, with the development of the foundational supports strategy, the NDIS’ support needs assessment and budget model and a tiered registration system for providers. It’s important that these critical reforms support innovation in housing and living supports for people with disability. You can read our submission to the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission on the registration of NDIS participants who self-direct their NDIS funded supports here.

I hope you enjoy this edition of Summer Focus. If you have colleagues or friends in the disability community or working in the disability sector, we’d love you to share this edition with them or encourage them to sign up to our mailing list. We will have lots of exciting research, events and other information to share this year.

Di Winkler CEO and Founder

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New podcast episode: Diving Deeper into Individualized Living Arrangements

On this episode of Reasonable & Necessary, Dr George is joined by Rod Davies, CEO of One2One. We learn how aIn the latest episode of Reasonable & Necessary, we learn how a lifelong relationship with a childhood friend sparked One2One CEO Rod Davies’ passion to deliver truly person-centered housing and support solutions for people with disability.

Registration of NDIS participants who self-direct their supports – Summer Foundation submission

We have provided a response to the government’s consultation on the design of the registration category for NDIS participants who self-direct their supports. We made 7 key recommendations for this registration category.

5 things people with disability do and don’t want in SDA

A co-design project was undertaken by the Summer Foundation, to inform the design of contemporary specialist disability accommodation (SDA) for thin markets. The aim of this project was to partner with people with disability and the building and design sectors to co-design innovative models of housing that foster a user-driven SDA market.

Your toolkit for moving out of aged care

The Department of Social Services, designed to be a helpful one-stop-shop source of information for people with disability on moving out of aged care. The toolkit covers key concerns on the journey out of aged care, and breaks down information on finding housing options, the basics of moving, settling in and ongoing support.

New co-designed resources for navigating NDIS housing issues

We’ve co-designed these resources to help NDIS participants know their rights and how to take action when they feel a situation puts their rights or safety at risk.

Promising early findings from longitudinal SDA study

The Summer Foundation and La Trobe University are investigating this across 4 key indicators: health, wellbeing, community integration and paid support needs, through the Home and Living Outcome Framework study. The toolkit covers key concerns on the journey out of aged care, and breaks down information on finding housing options, the basics of moving, settling in and ongoing support.

Meet Jamie-Lee

My name is Jamie-Lee Dwyer and I’m a 34 year old woman living on the Gold Coast. I currently work at the Housing Hub as a copywriting assistant, and as part of that I write a lot of lived experience blogs. I hope to make a difference for other people with disabilities going through similar struggles so they don’t feel alone.

Specialist Disability Accommodation (SDA) can create greater independence for people with disability, while also allowing their other supports to be delivered better and more safely.

However, badly designed SDA risks Australia developing social infrastructure that doesn’t live up to its potential.

Recently, the Summer Foundation brought together 15 people with lived experience of disability and a consultant architect to co-develop design principles that will drive innovation in SDA.

Here, we share key insights from the process in the form of 5 things people want – and don’t want – in SDA.

5 things people with disability DO want:

Universal accessibility lets people undertake daily activities independently and with dignity.
Access – to the home, from the home and within the home – is fundamental to get right. Universal accessibility reduces demand on others and enables greater autonomy, but it also removes barriers to activities that make life meaningful.

“We have a garden club and some of the beds are raised and I’ve been enjoying planting and digging…but some of the beds are inaccessible to me.” – Lived Experience Partner
Adequate space to move around freely improves quality of life.
There must be greater consideration for home layout, and the ways in which design can remove friction and improve the flexibility of a space. Well-designed SDA should let people with disability move around safely and efficiently, while also enabling and encouraging activities that improve quality of life, such as fitness, hobbies and entertaining visitors.

“Doing the 20 point turns in a manual wheelchair gets a bit tiring.” – Lived Experience Partner

Designing for modification and customisation can support changing needs.
Some design elements can be universal. However, SDA should also plan for customisation to balance the current and future needs of people with disability. This could look like reinforced ceilings and walls to support the addition of grab rails and ceiling track hoists.

“I have to have rails of course, to you know, hoist – get in the shower and toilet, but they couldn’t do one rail because there’s no beams, they forgot some of the beams.”
– Lived Experience Partner
Assistive technology (AT) increases control.
Good AT gives people with disability greater control in their environment, helping them to access support and amenities, and feel more safe and secure at home.

“I love the intercom because all you [have to] do is utilise the intercom and it can get down to the staff room and say, hey, look, I need some assistance immediately. And someone will be up here within two minutes.” – Lived Experience Partner
Sensitive sensory design improves comfort.
Sensory elements like temperature, light and noise may be felt more acutely by people with disability, and need to be carefully considered in the design process. For example, block out blinds can help with light sensitivity, and sensor lights help increase visibility on the approach to the home.

“I like to know that there’s enough lighting outside. So when I pull up in the cab, there’s sufficient lighting around… so the taxi pulls up, the sensor light comes on, and I’m able to access – to go inside without feeling… afraid.” – Lived Experience Partner

5 things they DON’T want:

Housing design should support, not separate, families.
Not all households look the same. Yet, assumptions about people with disability lead to SDA designed for the “stereotypical norm” – frequently to the detriment of existing household arrangements.

“…the idea that people with disabilities are just only themselves and [that] they don’t come with anyone else…” – Lived Experience Partner
Poorly chosen locations lead to inconvenience and isolation.
SDA developments in decentralised locations have trickle-down effects, separating people with disability from essential services, meaningful activities and community.

“That’s the other problem with SDA in [rural town], is they’re all like 5 or 6 K’s [kilometres] out of town, not near shops, not near anything.” – Lived Experience Partner
Support should be close by, but not automatically onsite.
The ability to choose when and how to engage supports is important to maintaining a sense of privacy and independence. This can be achieved by providing options to people with disability – such as proximal, but not onsite supports.

“If I need help, I can call on them. And if I don’t, I don’t have to see them. Which works for me because I want to be as independent as possible.” – Lived Experience Partner
Homes should feel like homes, not hospitals.
Design elements that create a sense of home and increase comfort have the power to make SDA feel like home and “something not hospital-like”. People with disability value the opportunity to have input, too – such as choosing colours.

“I need a garden. I need a backyard… I need a tree – I just need a home that looks like a home that regular people would have. But with accommodations for what I need.”
– Lived Experience Partner
Generic technology can create frustration.
Not all assisted technology is created equal. Things like light switches that are inaccessible from bed, or windows that aren’t automated hinder people’s ability to adapt their homes for their comfort – and cause great frustration.

“If I don’t have support [the windows] just stay open.” – Lived Experience Partner

SDA must be designed to be adaptable, functional and liveable for people with disability.

SDA providers can get it right from the get-go by incorporating the perspectives of those with lived experience into the design process.

Read Full Report

The Australian Government is consulting on a new registration system for NDIS providers.

In January, the Summer Foundation provided a response to the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission’s consultation on the design of the registration category for NDIS participants who self-direct their supports.

The Summer Foundation’s position is that the considered design of the system of proportionate regulation—including this component (people who self-direct their supports)—is key to ensuring that the NDIS can achieve its original intent of supporting the independence and social and economic participation of people with disabiliity.

We made 7 key recommendations:

Create a regulation system that encourages new housing and support opportunities for people with disability.
Make sure government information is clear and easy to understand so participants know their rights and responsibilities.
Only remove self-direction as a last resort based on risk to the participant.
Design the regulation system with input from people with disability, including their role in monitoring and compliance.
Define self-direction to include all ways workers can be involved.
Ensure the Self-Directed Supports category is easy for all NDIS participants to understand and use.
Value and invest in peer networks and resources to help participants understand their rights and responsibilities.

READ OUR SUBMISSION

Housing that starts with the person

In the latest episode of our Reasonable & Necessary podcast, Dr George catches up with CEO Rod Davies of One2One, a WA-based NDIS provider supporting 119 people, each of them in a housing arrangement individually designed for them.

Sharing his experiences as a support worker and co-resident, Rod discusses the person-by-person philosophy behind One2One’s individual service design approach, and why individualised living arrangements should be designed around what brings meaning to the person’s life.

Rod says, “We ask the question ‘What is it that makes this person’s life meaningful?’ And no matter how significant the person’s disability is, there is always something that the person or the people around them know about that person that makes them tick. And that’s the stuff that…you want to design into whatever the support arrangement is.”

Talking not only to the person themselves but others who know them really well helps One2One design around a real “three dimensional picture” grounded in belonging.

This personalised approach moves away from the traditional one-size-fits-all model and instead prioritises each person’s life goals.

The episode explores what would be required in Australia to support the growth of individualised living arrangements.

Download transcript

Listen to the podcast on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

View all podcasts