A brighter future for homeless men – The Michael Project, Mission Australia

May , 1 – BY SKYE LEWIS –  The Michael Project is an inspiring new program designed by Mission Australia to provide support to homeless men, taking them out of the confines of isolation which are rife in the world of homelessness.

The final report for the project was launched on 17 April 2012, with attendees taken through the results of the research by Professor Paul Flatau, Chair in Social Investment and Impact and Director of the Centre for Social Impact at the University of Western Australia. They were also treated with special guest presenter Dr Dennis Culhane, Chair of Social Policy at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Michael Project was created with homeless men in the centre, using a range of services to ensure their quality of life was improved across as many areas as possible over the course of the 12 month program. The key was building on existing services to extend the range of support.

Mission Australia was able to demonstrate that the program could effectively save Australian taxpayers as much as $3,061 per participant.

The following three points were the focus of the project, and the reasons for its success:

• Providing temporary accommodation – leading to more long-term housing
• Providing specialist support service access – this helped to increase many of the men’s ability to earn an income and be more involved at a social level
• Providing one-to-one support from a case worker, assigned at the beginning of the project

Ogilvy Impact partnered with Mission Australia to produce a short video, bringing to life a developed infographic, for the launch of the project and to visually summarise the 69-page report. The video has been embedded into the Mission Australia page and has resulted in over 500 views, an excellent result in terms of awareness of the project and the work that Mission Australia does.

http://www.missionaustralia.com.au/research-and-social-policy/3153-the-michael-project

Global Safety Leaders

Qantas is Australia’s largest domestic and international airline. The Qantas Group employs approximately 36,000 people and offers services across 140 destinations within 37 countries.

Qantas needed to improve the level of workplace safety with all ground services. A new safety program required large-scale behavioural change for thousands of people and compliance with different legislations. Qantas wanted this new safety program to be regarded as world best practice in ground safety.

Impact created the strategic campaign ‘Safe Airline For Everyone (S.A.F.E)’. It was rolled out to all Qantas ground service employees in May 2002. Manager engagement was a key element of the approach and a tailored toolkit was created for each manager to use when educating their teams about the new workplace safety procedures. The campaign was highly visual to ensure high impact with posters, presentations and a video. The ground work behind the strategy came from Impact’s research engagement tool, ‘Word On The Street’. It ensured the messages and strategy were developed with the key audience’s issues and needs as a priority.

The campaign was incredibly successful and highly regarded. Qantas experienced more than an 80% reduction in the ‘lost time due to injury’ frequency rate. There was a significant increase in productivity equating to millions of dollars in savings. The effectiveness of the campaign has ensured its long life in Qantas and it has since been refreshed with a target for ‘No Injuries’.