The background
Co-designed with carers, Weavers is a peer-to-peer carer-led model that connects people who are caring for a loved one with someone who has lived experience of being a carer. The model provides individualised one-to-one support for carers, and is designed for people who don’t have the time to connect to the group peer support available throughout the system.
Since launching in 2013, Weavers has supported more than 150 unpaid carers in partnership with eight implementation partners across Australia and New Zealand. We partner with organisations in the aged care, disability services and palliative care sectors who are passionate about supporting people caring for a loved one.
The vision
Our ambition for Weavers is big: to scale Weavers within Australia and internationally, and build true and effective support for carers looking after a loved one. To do this, we needed to:
- Significantly increase the way in which the growing network of Weavers programs could collectively achieve improved outcomes for carers
- Provide a quality framework across all implementation partners
- Increase our capacity to respond to greater opportunities for scale of Weavers
The insights
- Implementation of a new practice takes time and rigour in the approach
- Funding for carers is limited across the many service systems
- Funding is often short term, which is a challenge when implementing a new approach
- Longer term funding for programs is hard to secure, which leads to challenges in maintaining quality delivery in sustainable ways
The outcome
Together with three of our current delivery partners – Multicultural Communities Council of Illawarra, Mission Australia Shoalhaven, and the Illawarra Women’s Health Centre – we co-designed a learning and training platform as a cost effective and sustainable approach to support implementation beyond startup.
The platform is an ongoing training and quality mechanism that operates as a resource during and beyond early implementation, and offers a greater opportunity for organisations to implement Weavers as a sustainable model of peer support for carers.
Designed through an implementation science approach, it provides delivery organisations with access to key training, facilitation and learning experiences to use throughout their implementation journey. It also responds to the reality of staff turnover, ensuring that the model’s resources are available for the organisation to refer back to, so that anyone involved with Weavers understands what good practice looks like and how to deliver it.
