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.

Summer Foundation Focus – February 2025