Tara’s Helping Hands Support Work Day Activities Centre closes after nine months

A lack of community support and staffing issues have forced a Tara NDIS support centre to close its doors, less than a year after opening. Find out more here.

Helping Hands Tara has closed nine months after opening.

After only nine months, Tara’s Helping Hands Support Work Day Activities Centre has been forced to close its doors due to a lack of community support.

The service centre aimed to provide activities and support for elderly and disabled clients filling a much-needed gap in the regional market.

Despite this the centre faced a series of challenges and director Danielle Rae said they were forced to close.

“We opened the day centre in October last year and it was closed by the end of June, we just haven’t had enough clients attend,” she said.

“We are still running the business providing in-home care, we just don’t have the centre open for day activities. Unfortunately we just didn't have the local support of the community and faced a lot of management issues.

“This was a huge investment from myself as a single mum on single income to provide all of this for the local NDIS clients.

“I still can’t believe only a short nine months ago I invested into purchasing all these items brand new outright to give the Western Downs NDIS community the opportunity to have these services available to them and for it to end up like this is so disheartening as a business owner.”

Ms Rae said she faced significant issues trying to get the centre up and running.

“There are plenty of clients in the community but we didn’t have the referrals,” she said.

“We promoted we were open for DVA and NDIS clients and had community fundraising days, but what we came up against was the managers saying they didn’t have enough funding for community access activities or didn’t have a transport access package to attend them.

“We reached out to the local school who didn’t have after school care and tried to run a before and after school care and vacation care but didn’t get enough expressions of interest.

“I put on a few events like discos, karaoke and sausage sizzles to try to support the community. It was always running at a cost but I wanted to make our presence known.

“We also unfortunately had staff poach clients and had two vehicles written off which had quite an impact on our business.”

Ms Rae said she had now sold off all the items purchased for the centre in a fire sale and was looking for new clients to support through home care.

“When we opened there wasn’t many providers in the area there was a high population of aged and NDIS in the community so I thought it was a service people would support, it’s unfortunate but you can only do what you can do,” she said.

“I have now closed the centre and am running my business and providing in house services, it’s a huge lesson learnt.

“We are looking for new client referrals for the business to last, I’ve got some loyal staff still with us and I want to give them enough hours to work, losing clients has impacted us because we had no notice, it’s not just myself affected but the staff working with us.”