Every door is the right door – how ESOs contribute to wellbeing

Annabelle Wilson
Veteran Family Commissioner

With the establishment of the new wellbeing agency, our ex-service organisations (ESOs) have a new opportunity for veterans and families of veterans to connect to, and navigate through, the incredible support system that already exists.

On Friday, 29 October 2021, I was a beneficiary receiving support from the ESO community. On Monday, 1 November 2021, I was instead lead­ing the service delivery team at one of Victoria’s major ESOs. 

That rapid transition gave me a rare vantage point. I was able to look at our service delivery through a client lens and use those real-world insights to identify what was working, and pos­sibly more importantly, what was not. 

As a beneficiary, I had been dropped into the crowded and confusing “spaghetti soup” that was the ESO sector and couldn’t navigate it. So, I didn’t. I had been told by DVA that they couldn’t help me. So, I assumed I didn’t belong there anyway. I didn’t know which number to call, so I called none. 

Redesigning the service delivery model started there. It became about laying a clear bread­crumb trail. If someone contacted us, we needed to be able to either help them directly or connect them to someone who could. I would love to see an ESO sector built on this principle: it’s not “no wrong door”, it’s that “every door is the right door”. 

Service delivery models are not abstract con­cepts. They are practical frameworks that should be shaped by the experiences and needs our community. And as a result of my real-world insights, I knew that articulating our service delivery was critical. Not only to help establish who we were to our families, but also so we had an understanding internally about where we sat in the ecosystem of supports. 

What then became evident through this pro­cess was that we didn’t need to just know about the ecosystem, but we had to actually link our­selves with the other supports and services in the community. And not only the ones in gov­ernment and the other ESOs, but the ones in the wider community services network too. 

Consortium was queen here, and support was strongest when we acted as one. By that I mean that I saw this concept really work when we ran programs that were formally linked, co-badged or embedded. We can’t all do everything, but if we each play our part we all help each family in different ways and avoid duplication (i.e. the dreaded “spaghetti soup”). 

Another key principle we knew early on was that families are not a one-size-fits-all. They have different structures, challenges, values, goals, and definitions of what “success” looks like. 

For our service delivery model, this meant that we first needed to get to know each family practically, psychosocially and financially. What were their personal circumstances and the bar­riers preventing them from having their needs met. For this, alongside our internal team of professional case managers, we also embedded a financial counselling component (from a dif­ferent ESO) to the intake process. 

It was important to us to help families to iden­tify their goals and priorities across the 3 areas and build literacy from experts in the field around what potential changes needed to be made. And while emergency financial support was sometimes necessary, we found the most sustainable outcomes came from helping fami­lies build the skills to take control of their own situation. The old “teach a man to fish” principle. 

Once we had established the need, the next step was to identify the connection points. 

For our particular service, we found that many of our families were ineligible for traditional ESO supports, making partnerships with the broader community services sector essential. Strong referral pathways became a core feature of our service. 

I’m not saying anything groundbreaking when I say that one of the most important aspects of post-traumatic growth is peer connection, and this is where the programs that we delivered really came into their own. We hosted events for widows of veterans to gather together and seasonal family days at ticketed places like the zoo and the aquarium so our beneficiar­ies could build relationships in a low-pressure environment. 

The best thing we did though (in my humble opinion) was our youth camps. Each school holi­days we ran camps for our school-aged kids, and twice a year a family camp for the whole family. The feedback was extraordinary: children who struggled to form friendships due to frequent relocations found peers who understood them. Friendships were formed, and families began to heal. 

And gathering this feedback uncovered another home truth for me: sometimes when we get so knee deep in the delivery of services and supports, we deprioritise actually tracking the impact of them. Why this happens is so under­standable, given that we want to spend all our efforts on actually running the program, rather than diverting resources to evaluation. But over time, I began to see this as an investment, to ensure our services genuinely met the needs of our families and to identify growth opportuni­ties, and it is now something I believe should be a core element of all programs, both inside and outside of government. 

With wellbeing undoubtedly a focus in our community, communicating how our ESOs play a part in the rehabilitation of our families, and what do we do to contribute to postvention support and post-traumatic growth is arguably more important than ever. 

So, what does utopia look like for me? 

I’d love for each of us to understand our service delivery and be able to articulate to our commu­nity exactly what we do to help them. I’d love for each of us to understand how we fit into the rest of the ESO sector, know who we refer to and who refers to us (the coveted “breadcrumb trail”) and link our services together where possible. And I’d love for each of us to be able to track the impact of our service delivery and explain, using real data, what is successful and where the growth opportunities lie. 

I would encourage anyone who runs a service to take hold of this opportunity, and I would encourage anyone who interacts with a service to seek this from it. 

We should all be looking inward at what con­tributes to the support and improvement of the lives of our veterans and the families of our vet­erans, and work on how we are articulating that value add, and how we are connecting that value add to the wellbeing support structures already in the space. And those about to come.