Uniting Country SA Financial Wellbeing Program: Evaluation Report

Uniting Country SA (UCSA) is administering a Financial Wellbeing Program (FWP) in the Yorke Peninsula and Far North regions of South Australia. This project aimed to evaluate the UCSA FWP Service Model to assess if the service is welcoming, respectful, empowering, culturally appropriate and outcomes focused. This is a general program, with the research project aiming to find out how well the program supports all program users.
To meet the project aims, this evaluation sought to understand participants’ lived experiences of using the UCSA FWP to contribute to its improvement during the program funding period. Findings will contribute to shaping the future operation of the program. The program itself aims to 'empower people to build their financial wellbeing and resilience through growth focused, person-centred interactions, education and community connections' (see Theory of Change document, fig. 1). With these aims in mind, we sought to answer the following research questions:
1) To what extent is Uniting Country SA's FWP effectively and appropriately meeting the financial wellbeing needs and expectations of participants?
2) What are the lived experience outcomes of the Uniting Country SA FWP? The project findings will inform the future operation of the program.
Overwhelmingly, the lived experience of the Uniting Country SA FWP was that it is life-changing. Participants’ accounts of outcomes ranged on a continuum from suicide prevention, ongoing debt management and prevention, through to developing the capacity to manage finances to the extent that they no longer required financial counselling. Aboriginal participants spoke about the UCSA FWP being culturally safe, with one of the participants saying they prefer to access this program rather than Aboriginal-specific programs because of concerns about Aboriginal community members knowing about their private business.
The main challenges that participants identified were related to insufficient appointment availability, staff changes and associated gaps in service. Aboriginal focus group participants also identified mismatched priorities between Aboriginal communities and those generally prescribed by social services, for example the responsibilities expected of clients to maintain service provision. This has led to some Aboriginal clients feeling culturally unsafe and so more work at an organisational level needs to occur to enhance cultural safety.