How the right goals can get you the right funding

Setting good goals may not may not always seem important, but they’re the most powerful tool in the set for getting the right funding for your needs.

Everyone has goals, even if we’re not always actively thinking of them. For a lot of us, goals are simply a vague idea about what we want in the future. The fact is though, without a clear and defined pathway to achieving these, most goals stay just that – vague ideas about the future. Goal setting is a very important part of NDIS plans and funding, and ensuring a clear outline for achieving these goals will provide you the best chance of securing the best funding for your needs.

The pathway and progress towards goals are two of the most critical factors in getting the right funding to access the support services you need from your plan review. Participants who clearly articulate how their goals relate to their needs and how the support services they want to access align with their goals are more likely to get the funding than those who don’t. Luckily, there are only a few simple steps that need to be taken to ensure you’re getting the most from your NDIS plan review.

Firstly, think about your goals over the last year – are you happy with your progress? If you are, identify the services and providers that made the biggest difference and how they might continue to support your growth. If not, think about the kinds of services you haven’t yet accessed and how they might help in the next year. It’s important to address how your health and wellbeing have been impacted where you haven’t been able to utilise your NDIS budget to progress your goals; planners often cut funding when a participant hasn’t used their budget and can’t demonstrate how that has impacted them.

Secondly, make sure your goals have a tangible outcome that relates to your needs: ‘I want to be more social’ is not clear and certainly not easily measurable or quantifiable, whereas ‘I want to see friends once a week’ is. Ensure that goal then relates to an area of need for you: a goal overcoming social challenges is not going to help you get funding if you do not experience social challenges, so keep your goals relevant to your needs!

Finally, identify the services you want to access in advance of your plan review and connect them to your goals. During your plan review meeting, you need to articulate how each of the services that you want to access will contribute to you achieving your goals. You can connect a number of different services to a single goal, or a single service to multiple goals, but each and every service must have its place in your journey forward.

Setting clear pathways for your goals will not only just help you get better funding, but more importantly, it will enable clear and measurable ways to achieve your best. And that is something we all want for ourselves and for those around us.

If you want to talk more about setting meaningful goals for your NDIS, the support staff are here to help anyone who needs it.