Students help the wheels keep on turning for national NFP

Meals on Wheels NSW is the state peak body for Meals on Wheels in NSW. Nationally, Meals on Wheels plays a crucial role in supporting the health and wellbeing of over 200,000 older Australians each year, in hundreds of locations across the country.

This project was run through the UTS Shopfront Community Coursework program, by the Centre for Social Justice & Inclusion.

For their project brief, students were asked to come up with a framework for mergers, integration and cooperation across their services. They needed to consider changes made to the government’s Aged Care funding framework, along with what Meals on Wheels members – all with varying needs – require to continue to provide ‘more than just a meal’ to their local communities.

‘I really learnt a lot from the group of students. It was fascinating,’ said Claudia Odello, General Manager, Marketing and Fundraising for Meals on Wheels NSW.

‘These tools enable MOW to grow, merge and collaborate, using each other's resources to support the overall goals and mission of Meals on Wheels.’

Students interviewed and audited local Meals on Wheels organisations that had already been through a merger to better understand the process. From these interviews, they presented recommendations for various business models and merging processes that could suit a variety of the organisation’s services across Australia.

They then created an implementation process for collaborating and merging, putting together a board assessment toll to help local meals on wheels services decide if they are in a position to work collaboratively, as well as a decision tree to work out which business option best suits their local organisation.

As someone from a marketing background, Claudia said the project really opened her eyes to the business operations side of the organisation.

It blew me away how different every Meals on Wheels organisation is, and the students helped me discover this.

They also did work around defining the type of people required to allow the organisation to go through a merging process. They actually looked at existing members within the organisation, and gave us an idea of employees that may be needed in the future.

Following the project completion (each Shopfront project is completed over one semester), each tool was uploaded to the Meals on Wheels NSW website for members to access. And they are already proving useful.

Meals on Wheels Coffs Harbour used the tools to help them through their merging process, while Meals on Wheels Wollongong – who paid a consultant to do a review for a similar merge before the program – are now actively using the tools instead of paying for consultancy.

‘With the competition in the market place, Meals on Wheels is going to have to put a much stronger business hat on … because funding isn’t guaranteed,’ Claudia said.

‘These tools will enable us to still deliver the services without paying consultants each time a local mow wants to collaborate or merge.

‘This project was extremely beneficial and will save us a lot of money now and in the future. To have the students actually provide us with these tools was terrific,’ she said.

Shopfront Community Coursework projects pair students’ learning with the needs of community organisations. It’s a win-win situation, creating mutual value for everyone and helping funnel much-needed skill and expertise into the not-for-profit sector, by contributing to organisations that otherwise would not be able to afford these services.

Founded in 1996, Shopfront is the longest running cross-faculty, university-community engagement program in Australia. Over 1,200 projects successfully completed with more than 800 community organisations since 1996.