Our Strategic Plan

ACSO’s three-year Strategic Plan (2020-2023) had a focus on five key areas: the wellbeing of our people, creating a meaningful client experience, influencing change, innovative design and sustainable growth. To support these priorities, ACSO has delivered a range of strategic projects over the past year, and whilst the pandemic slowed things down, we are proud of the significant progress made.

The major achievement for this year in our Diversity and Inclusion Strategy, was the development and endorsement of our Reflect Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP). This has been a long time in the making for ACSO, as we were waiting to ensure we could undertake the process genuinely and thoughtfully. With this RAP now endorsed, and several partnerships with First Nations organisations cemented, ACSO feel proud of our journey towards Reconciliation, Treaty and Inclusion of First Nations people in our work.

As part of ACSO’s Client Participation Strategy, our Lived Experience Advisory Panel (LEAP) has this year further developed into a vital space for the client voice to be heard in service development, submission papers and broader education into the community, focused on influencing change. Our panel members have engaged in multiple different opportunities to speak to wide audiences about the need for justice reform and more support services.

ACSO developed a new Clinical Governance and Practice Framework to ensure our clients have a meaningful experience at ACSO and the wellbeing of our people is cemented in our practice. To further this work, a new Work Health and Safety Framework was also developed to again prioritise the safety and wellbeing of our people.

A new Outcomes and Reporting Framework was implemented in 2021, and we are now seeing positive outcome focused data for clients reported from some of our programs. This will help ACSO continuously improve our practice and service delivery and really understand the impact our work is having on supporting our clients with the opportunity to thrive. These tools have been enabled in our Client Management System OSCA, which this year also saw several new programs built, again working towards achieving our strategic objectives.

A new website, intranet and freshly rebranded hubs have been delivered as part of our Marketing Strategy, which has a goal to establish ACSO as a trusted and reliable changemaker across the sector. In addition, our Humans of ACSO story series brings to life our new brand Ethos – “Understand the Story. Support the Change.” Our hope is that by sharing this content, we will influence change through compassion, discussion and education.

ACSO continue to focus on sustainable growth and this year was happy to secure new Federal Government funding to deliver a pilot program in NSW (Illawarra) called Boost. In partnership with Police and Youth Justice, Boost was designed to support young people at risk of breaching an Apprehended Violence Order. The program will ideally support improvement in young people’s wellbeing and work to our vision where prison truly is the last resort.