Impact Report 2024—2025

Focus area 5

Team of 7 coworkers of mixed age, gender and ethnicity stand in front of a red brick wall with greenery growing over it.

Workforce

Workforce instability limits the sector’s ability to meet rising demand. Our focus is on investing in a stable, diverse workforce with lived experience and multidisciplinary skills.

In short

Workforce stability is essential to client outcomes. At Launch Housing, turnover has dropped from 28% to 15% in three years, thanks to converting roles into ongoing positions and building teams that reflect lived experience. This turnover rate is aligned with the national average and is significantly lower than the Victorian average.

What's next

We will apply lessons from the past five years to continue cultivating a safe and purposeful culture, and advocate for sustainable funding that reflects true workforce costs.

People: Why workforce stability matters

Trust between staff and clients is critical to recovery and stability. When staff stay in the organisation for longer, clients benefit from consistent case management, stronger relationships, and support that builds over time.

High staff retention reduces disruption, allowing workers to focus on care rather than handovers. Skilled, multidisciplinary teams, including a mix of lived experience, cultural and clinical specialists, can de-escalate trauma and connect people with broader systems of support.

One of the key drivers for workforce instability in the community sector is insecure employment driven by temporary funding arrangements. These funding models lead community service agencies to employ staff on fixed-term contracts, forcing staff to bear the lion’s share of the risks caused by the temporary funding models. To counter this, over the last three years, we have strengthened workforce stability by converting as many roles as possible to ongoing positions.

At Launch Housing, our staff turnover has reduced from 28% to 15%. But sector-wide instability remains high, with the Victorian housing sector turnover at 24% compared to the national average of 15% across all industries.1

Woman smiles, leaning on kitchen bench with a mug in her hands, talking to another person out of the frame.
Image: Our team provides round-the-clock support services for women and children at Viv’s Place, ensuring families have everything they need to recover, rebuild, and thrive. Image credit: Launch Housing.

People: Reflecting our diverse community

We are strengthening our commitment to creating a workplace where everyone, staff and clients alike, can feel safe to be their whole self. Our Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging Framework guides this work, providing an organisation-wide approach to embedding equity, cultural safety and psychosocial wellbeing across all parts of Launch Housing.

Through the Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging Framework, we are deepening a shared understanding, strengthening partnerships and aligning our internal systems so that diversity and inclusion are reflected in everyday practice. This includes ongoing training, knowledge sharing and initiatives that build a safe, purposeful and connected culture.

The Framework is built around four key pillars:

  1. First Nations Cultural Safety
  2. All Cultures and Ethnicities (ACE)
  3. LGBTQIA+
  4. Visible and Invisible Disabilities

To bring these pillars to life, we have established staff-led working groups that drive tangible outcomes across Launch Housing. These groups draw on lived experience and professional expertise to strengthen inclusive policies, practices and programs.

This representation matters. It helps ensure Launch Housing has a workforce that understands the intersecting impacts our clients face, builds deeper trust, dismantles stigma and ensures our practice is shaped by those who know the system from the inside.

Eight people from Launch Housing's First Nations Working Group hold "Treaty Yeah! Treaty Now!" posters in support of the Treaty for Victoria campaign.
Image: Launch Housing's First Nations Working Group showing support for truth-telling and the Treaty for Victoria campaign. Image credit: Launch Housing.

Systems: Workforce instability continues to limit the sector’s ability to meet rising demand

Workforce instability is still a sector-wide challenge. High turnover reflects systemic underinvestment, rising caseloads that workers are expected to manage, and the toll of burnout and vicarious trauma. Burnout is not just about workload; it is about working hard without seeing impact and client outcomes. Program funding rarely covers overheads like supervision, training, or staff wellbeing, forcing organisations like ours to absorb these costs.

Evidence from our innovative, integrated models demonstrates what is possible when the right workforce mix is in place, including lived experience, cultural safety, and multidisciplinary expertise. Teams with multidisciplinary skillsets and lived experiences achieve the strongest tenancy sustainment and wellbeing outcomes for clients. This demonstrates that when systems invest properly in workforce capacity and stability, client outcomes improve.

However, this workforce development must extend beyond our sector. Partnerships with health, education, and community services are essential for a workforce that can respond to the intersecting needs of people experiencing homelessness.

Advocacy: What’s next for Launch Housing

We know that stable, representative, and well-supported teams deliver stronger outcomes for clients, and this is backed by research conducted for the Council to Homeless Persons by the Workforce Innovation and Development Institute (WIDI), RMIT University.2

Looking ahead, we will build on the lessons from our practice over the last five years, focusing on:

  • Strengthening lived experience Diversity and Inclusion pathways. This includes continuing to embed Diversity and Inclusion into all of our processes, guidelines, reducing cultural load, and expanding leadership and training opportunities for staff from all parts of our community. (Aligned with WIDI recommendation 1.3)
  • Investing in multidisciplinary capability. This includes securing recurrent funding for teams that blend case workers, health professionals, Alcohol and Other Drugs specialists and cultural workers. (Aligned with WIDI recommendation 3.1)
  • Embedding workforce sustainability in policy and funding reform. We will continue advocating for our contracts to cover overheads such as training and supervision. Funding that creates capacity for delivering meaningful client outcomes is also funding that protects the workforce. (Aligned with WIDI recommendations 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 3.2, 4.1)
  • Enabling career growth and development. We want to enable staff to move across roles, programs, and sectors to build expertise and reduce burnout. We will do this by strengthening internal mobility to foster relationships and deepen practice knowledge and implement a skills framework to support career pathways and workforce planning. (Aligned with WIDI recommendations 1.1, 2.2, 3.1)

How do we measure success?

Read about our key impact measures for 2025
Our key impact measures

Footnotes

  1. Victoria State Government. (2025). Key Performance Measures 2023-24. Department of Families, Fairness and Housing.
  2. Workforce Innovation and Development Institute (2024). SHS Workforce Analysis Report 2024. RMIT University.
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Acknowledgement of Country

We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the lands on which we live and work. As we create safe and welcoming homes, we honour the people of the Kulin nation and their enduring connection to their home we call Naarm, Melbourne.

We pay our respects to all First Nations Elders, past and present.

It is important that we acknowledge that the contemporary housing experience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people cannot be separated from their historical experience of dispossession and dislocation. Aboriginal Victorians are overrepresented in the population experiencing homelessness, with census data confirming that Aboriginal Victorians experience homelessness at over five times the rate for non-Aboriginal people.

We support the development of a culturally safe Aboriginal housing and homelessness sector based on principles of self-determination and will continue to do what we can to help make this happen.

We are committed to understanding how our services are impacting Aboriginal clients and, where relevant, we have disaggregated our 10 Impact Measures to report Aboriginal client outcomes.