Our origins
The origins of Ultimate Services Australia begin in 2013 with the development of a youth work consultancy and training service… Ultimate Youth Worker.
While having a few drinks and lamenting the dire state of managerial support and supervision in the youth sector the bones of Ultimate Youth Worker fell into place. A small group of highly qualified and experienced youth workers decided to begin the Ultimate Supervision Service, Quality supervision for groups and individual youth workers by youth workers.
What began as an idea grew to supporting dozens of youth workers within the first twelve months. During this time we were invited by a number of groups throughout Australia to provide seminars on self care for youth workers. We also had the opportunity to speak twice at the Australian Youth Affairs Conference 2013 on how staff can support themselves for longevity in the field.
In the beginning we also decided to write a blog. We wanted a platform for thinkers from the youth sector to voice their thoughts on the future of youth work. The blog had writers from throughout Australia and around the globe on topics from professionalisation to mental health training and much much more.
In that first year we went from a purely voluntary team to a group of part-time employees. Flash forward to 2020 and we had expanded our services from just working with the youth sector to training the likes of social workers, counsellors and educators who support young people. We also worked with their organisations to make them child safe and increase the quality of their work.
2020 begins a new direction
2020 will go down in history as a time where the world needed to pivot. Covid-19 took the world by storm and the social sector in Australia took a significant shift to online supports. This led to many human services staff feeling out of their depth while being thrust into a very new working environment they had little training to manage.
During this time we were engaged by many services to provide online training, webinars and organisational supports. We trained close to 1000 people on the Victorian Child Safety Standards, nearly 100 people on how to speak with young people who were using and abusing substances, we delivered Mental Health First Aid Courses and self care training to social workers across Australia.
We were also asked to provide more organisational development work than ever before. We wrote policies and procedures on everything from child safety and coronavirus safety to NDIS and staff wellbeing. It was clear to us that human services organisations needed more support than they were getting.
The birth of Ultimate Services Australia
By September 2020 it had become clear that the Human Services Sector was in a new and exciting stage of evolution. Our previous ways of working had drastically changed, the training of staff became an online only affair and our organisations needed to rush new policies into being to meet the challenges head on.
Our team looked at all these changes and began to wonder what that meant for our little business. For almost a decade we had specifically focused our time and energy into supporting the youth sector in Australia. We began to feel that this focus needed to be widened. We also felt that we needed to focus on the organisations that make up the human services sector. In supporting their missions we can build better services.
Finally, our staff team were all in agreement that we needed to go back to our roots of direct practice. While we all had some connection to direct service in other organisations we felt that we could become a beacon of excellence in youth services provision and that this needed to become a priority work area.
