Inside the Canberra service built for people who don’t fit one box

The people who find their way to Community Options rarely arrive with one tidy problem. There might be an illness, a new baby, a home that has become hard to manage and a pile of forms nobody has had the energy to fill in, all arriving at once and all tangled together. For 37 years, the Canberra organisation has made a point of taking on the whole tangle.

Sometimes that means weeks of patient coordination. Sometimes it means moving fast. When a mother whose newborn was in neonatal intensive care developed acute mastitis and needed an electric breast pump, the team bought one and had it at the hospital within about an hour, just as the weekend was starting.

For that family, it meant one less thing to carry during one of the hardest weeks of their lives. It’s one of many stories Community Options CEO Brendan Taber could choose from, and it says a lot about how the organisation works.

Something which may seem small to a service can mean an enormous amount to the person who needs
it,” – he says.

Community Options will close at the end of 2026. Its board voted in July to wind down after a funding bid in the 2026–27 ACT Budget was unsuccessful, and the team is working to conclude client services by 31 December, with some programs finishing earlier. Until then it’s still open, and that’s worth knowing. Brendan says referrals have dropped, partly because some people believe the service has already closed.

Community Options works in the space between services

Most community services are funded to meet one defined need, whether that’s health, aged care, disability, housing or family support. Brendan describes Community Options as the organisation that works across those boundaries.

“Community Options helps people when no single service can, or will, take responsibility for their whole
situation.”

The team starts by looking at everything happening in a person’s life and working out what’s getting in the way of them being safe or reaching their goals. From there, the response might involve coordinating several services at once, advocating when a system isn’t listening or paying for practical help that no other program will fund, and staff stay involved until it’s actually working.

The people who fall between programs usually have more than one need

The person who falls between programs might be an older person who is becoming more vulnerable but has no formal diagnosis, or whose mental health makes the aged care system hard to navigate. It could just as easily be a new mother who needs practical help to steady things at home without meeting the threshold for more intensive support, or someone with a serious illness who needs help coordinating care long before they’re eligible for another funded program.

“These people are not ineligible because they are doing well,” Brendan says. “They are often ineligible because programs have been designed around separate categories, while their lives are complex and interconnected.”

Sometimes it’s a person who has been referred on so many times that they’ve stopped asking. Without internet access, reliable transport or the right paperwork, and with no one beside them to help tell their story, even an hour on hold can be too much.

Whole-person support makes ordinary life possible

One story has stayed with Brendan. A parent living with advanced cancer was caring for a young child, and as the illness progressed, treatment, parenting and housework all became harder to manage. When their existing practical help ended, Community Options used its own funds to provide regular domestic assistance, alongside case management through its Palliative Care Project.

The family kept a safe, clean home, and the parent could stay there with their child and spend more of their limited energy on time together.
“On paper, it might look like a small amount of cleaning and case management,” Brendan says. “In someone’s life, it meant dignity, stability and precious time with their child.”

Brendan points out that the work can look simple from the outside “because our staff absorb much of the complexity.” A lift to an appointment or a few phone calls made on someone’s behalf can be enough to stop a situation falling apart.

Early help keeps small problems from becoming crises

When people can’t get this kind of help, Brendan says, their needs tend to grow. A manageable problem at home can turn into a health or safety crisis, carers wear out, appointments are missed and applications sit unfinished on the kitchen bench until people stop trying.

“Those needs eventually arrive somewhere, at a hospital, a crisis service, a homelessness service, the police, a family member’s doorstep or another overstretched community organisation.”

Community Options has always tried to reach people well before that point, while the problem is still small.

The flexible help that sat outside any program is the hardest part to hand over

Community Options currently supports about 94 people, and each is being helped to move to new supports. Its Care Finder service, which helps older people find their way into aged care, is no longer taking new referrals and is moving to COTA ACT, which will be operational by 17 November, with clients handed over through a consent-based process and warm referrals wherever possible. Marymead CatholicCare will take on the Women and Newborn Community Support Program, and Community Options is working with the Minister, the Health and Community Services Directorate and Canberra
Health Services on arrangements for its palliative care work. For now, both of those programs are still accepting referrals.

Programs and caseloads can be handed to new providers, but much of what made the difference in Brendan’s stories sat outside any program: the breast pump bought late on a Friday, or the cleaning paid for from Community Options’ own funds. After December, that kind of flexible help has no obvious home.

Brendan describes what’s at stake as the “connective tissue” Community Options has built across Canberra: staff who know how systems work in practice, who to call, and how to bring organisations together around one person, along with the trust built with clients who may have had poor experiences of services before.

You can transfer programs and client records, but it is much harder to transfer decades of local
knowledge, trusted relationships, professional judgement and the willingness to hold complexity when no
other service has clear responsibility for it.”

The people at the heart of the work want what most of us want

“They are people with histories, relationships, strengths, responsibilities and goals,” Brendan says of the people Community Options supports. “They want the same things most of us want: to feel safe, to retain their independence, to care for their families, to be heard and to have some control over their own lives.”

“Community Options has always believed that our role is not to decide what a good life looks like for someone else. It is to listen, understand what matters to them and help make that possible.”

When Brendan thinks about what he’ll remember most, he talks about his staff. Around 2017, the team swapped its Christmas Kris Kringle for donations to a local charity, choosing an organisation each year and giving money or goods such as non-perishable food. St John’s Care, the Early Morning Centre and Roundabout are among those they’ve supported.

“Supporting people has always been more than a job for our staff,” he says. “Their compassion extends beyond their roles, and that generosity and willingness to give are what I will remember most.”

The questions Brendan hopes Canberra will keep asking

Brendan wishes more people were asking these three questions.

1. Why do people have to reach crisis before the system becomes flexible enough to respond?
2. What value should we place on prevention when its success is often measured by the crisis that never happened?
3. Are we designing services around funding categories, or around the actual lives of the people who need them?

“Community Options has never expected people to divide their lives into separate, fundable problems,” he says. For Brendan, the heart of the story is whether Canberra will keep that capacity once Community Options is gone.

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