“From little things, much bigger things grow” and in marking the organisation’s third decade, this year has presented an opportunity to reflect both from where Brain Injury SA has come, as well as consider deeply where it is going.
It was a great pleasure for me and the Board to review achievements in our concluding three year Strategic Plan (2019–2022) whilst working together on where we go from here and importantly, where do we want to be in fifteen or more years’ time.
Like the founders of Brain Injury SA, the Board has a vision of what the organisation can achieve. Our continued growth over the last three years, particularly during the pandemic, has been significant, with an acknowledgement to our dedicated and hard-working team that drive quality in service delivery and innovation.
We know we can do so much more with a clear focus on what is important to the brain injury community, and a desire to assist as many people with brain injury as possible.
Important during the last year has been the continued positioning of the organisation for growth, with projects delivered to consolidate our software usage into a single system that can best manage the varied demands of our service delivery and some planned expansion of our Northern service. Change has necessarily been constant this year, as we experienced some of the most significant impacts on staffing from the pandemic to date, but ensuring we have good systems to support mobile and nimble response to service demands has been vital in this environment. Investing in service development in this way is considered essential by the Board. An early Annual Report for the organisation speaks about chasing funding for computer purchases. Thirty years on, maintaining an effective information technology platform is vital for operations in a contemporary organisation as well as ensuring cyber security for all the information we work with. The Board has been pleased to oversee a review of cyber security and implement new initiatives to strengthen this aspect of our service provision.
This year we saw the departure of one Board member, Michael Auciello, and we thank him for his contribution to the organisation over his three and a half years of Board service. We also saw the departure of our first Board trainees, Lauren Spear and Edward Fowler, who completed their term of two years. Experimental in nature, the Board traineeship has become a very successful initiative to draw more people with lived experience onto the Board, whilst not compromising the importance of a rich and diverse skill set amongst all Board members. We look forward to working with our new Board trainee as well as further strengthening the Board with new membership in the coming year.
Thirty years in the life of an organisation is both a long time and nothing in the continuing presence of brain injury in the community. Part of the vision of the Board is to ensure that Brain Injury SA stays close to progress made in brain injury research, and that services progressively develop as we learn more about what can be achieved, and diverse ways in which hope can be provided in rebuilding lives. We look forward to the organisation being able to celebrate the next thirty years with a similar sense of achievement in the depth and breadth of what it is delivering to the brain injury community, one year at a time.
Vladimir Malcik
Chair of Board
