The story behind the Ocean Street Project
The Benevolent Society’s proposed Ocean Street Project is an innovative model of housing, care and support for older people with a strong focus on integration with the local community, through which the Society aims to make a significant contribution to the challenges of an ageing Australia.
Population ageing raises major opportunities as well as challenges. As the Government’s National Strategy for an Ageing Australia has emphasised, population ageing is not ‘a crisis’ but it does require constructive planning to find solutions that will cater for the greater numbers of older people projected over the next 40 years, especially the much greater numbers of frail older people.
Key commentators have also recognised a need to:
- encourage older people’s social participation and value their contributions
- create communities that are more ‘age-friendly’, and to
- develop more and better models of housing and of care, particularly models that enable people to ‘age in place’.
As potential demands on funding are expected to grow rapidly, governments are also keenly interested in finding more cost effective ways of providing care to frail older people.
In developing the Ocean Street Project proposal the Society has drawn on its own experience of providing residential and community care to older people, plus research from Australia and overseas, in particular the work of the Humanitas Foundation in The Netherlands.
For detailed information, references and web links, read the Ocean Street Project Background Information Sheet. Or listen to ABC Radio National's By Design on trends in retirement housing.