I was pleased to join FCVic in January of this year, right in the middle of our Cost-of-Living Funding Campaign. With the amazing groundwork established by the FCVic team, member financial counsellors and financial counselling agencies, this campaign was capped off by some big wins. After being invited to the May State Budget lock-up for the first time in FCVic history, we were pleased with the announcement of a major funding boost for financial counselling in Victoria, through the $15m investment from the Victorian Property Fund.
It’s important to note that the success of this campaign can be measured not only in dollars, but in the conversations and engagement with decision-makers that we started and continue to maintain as part of our ongoing advocacy efforts to create both incremental and significant change for our sector.
Setting a direction for advocacy
Developing and establishing the FCVic Advocacy Priorities in the first quarter of 2024 has helped to inform advocacy activities throughout the year.
These five Priorities and the associated focus areas were identified by members through our Membership Survey, and further refined through member consultation and feedback. These Priorities act as a roadmap for how we as a peak body can best focus our advocacy efforts. It will also act as a guideline for action – as new and emerging issues and opportunities arise, we can review them against these Priorities to see where they best fit.
Adopting the four L’s (lead, liaise, leverage insights, lend support) has also helped us to focus our advocacy efforts, to amplify the voices of financial counsellors, to build partnerships and networks, and to make the most of the resources available.
We will be checking in with members periodically to ensure that the Priorities are still relevant and meaningful, especially in light of new and emerging issues that are encountered in daily casework.
Making financial counselling voices heard
Financial counsellors are experts in experiences of financial hardship and have many important insights and recommendations to share. This year, we have worked on refining the structure of our Collective Structures in line with the recommendations from an independent review, with the goal of supporting and amplifying the voices of financial counsellors through these Collective Structures.
Concurrently, we have had a strong focus on submissions with significant output – 21 submissions in the first half of the year, and a further 10 submissions since July. These have ranged from topics as broad as insurance, to energy affordability, from Centrepay to climate resilience, from financial abuse in financial services, to food security. The breadth of our input reflects the diversity of work undertaken by our member financial counsellors, and the growing complexity of client circumstances that they work with.
This growing case complexity has been highlighted in two recent pieces of work which together highlight key sector challenges and opportunities – the FCVic State Budget Submission 2025-26, and our submission to the CAV Financial Counselling Services Review. These two pieces of work were drawn from extensive member consultation and engagement to ensure that we as a peak body can best represent the interests of all our members.
Looking ahead
Looking ahead to 2025, two key focuses will be on regular, systemic, meaningful and useful engagements with key sector stakeholders and a widespread awareness campaign. Advocacy is never achieved alone – and so we will progress our engagement with those who can most influence the work we do, to ensure that our sector’s needs remain top of their agenda.
To support this stakeholder engagement work, we will be developing a widespread awareness campaign, focused on highlighting the impact of financial counsellors on clients, families, communities, and in managing community and health service demand in the long-term. We will be able to use the findings from our upcoming project on the economic benefits of financial counselling to support this campaign.
On a final note, I send my thanks to our members, who have been so generous in sharing their time, expertise and knowledge of the sector with me. I look forward to working with you all well into the future as we work towards a Victoria with fewer people in financial hardship.