The exciting consortium of OzChild, Youth Support and Advocacy Service (YSAS), Australian African Foundation for Retention and Opportunity (AAFRO), Charis Youth and Community, and the Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Agency (VACCA) has been chosen to lead and deliver the new and innovative Putting Families First (PFF) program in the Brimbank Melton area. 

 The consortium has come together with a shared vision of achieving better outcomes for young people and their families and in recognition and respect of each agency's breadth and depth of skills, knowledge, expertise and cultural match.​ PFF aims to intensively support people who come into contact with both the Child Protection and the Justice systems to make sustained change in their family’s lives. In Brimbank Melton the people PFF will be working with come from a diverse range of communities. 

 The current service system presents a range of challenges that make it difficult for families to overcome intergenerational and intrafamilial drivers of disadvantage and contact with the child protection and justice systems. This includes missed opportunities to intervene early, system barriers and a limited ‘whole of family’ lens to providing services and addressing the needs of family members, and the family as a unit.

PFF will seek to address many of the challenges that currently limit the impact of services for these families. This proof of concept provides a unique opportunity to impact intergenerational and intrafamily drivers of disadvantage through addressing underlying system barriers that impact service effectiveness for families experiencing disadvantage.

Addressing these barriers will then help enable practitioners to work with families to progress their holistic family goals and sustain improved health and wellbeing outcomes. In addition, it is hoped this innovative model of care will help shift system outcomes and avoid preventable future tertiary and justice service use.