This is the primary information site of a boutique disability service providing services to Townsville and the Burdekin areas. Flexi Holidays – below – caters for anyone who would like to have a holiday anywhere!
We provide a number of generic services as well as some very different ’boutique’ opportunities for families and individuals.
Services we offer are for anyone:
- elderly living at home, or very frail and needing higher support,
- Children and Adults with disabilities and/or
- People who struggle with poor mental health.
Our staff are trained and experienced in all these areas and we have considerable experience in adapting what YOU would like into action!
All our programs include a mix of individual activities and choices of group activities – individual choose their individual plans.
We offer:
Accommodation: Both supported accommodation, holiday units, independent accommodation and weekend holiday respite. Everyone in our accommodation services also chooses which activities they would like to participate in (see Below)
Community Activities: This includes a range of living skills support, assistance with daily activities, individual specialist support for particular goals as well as some great social activities. We have cooking, photography, get fit, sleepovers, craft, pottery, sports and a ton of other activities. All our activities include elements of learning throughout.
Respite: We call these Holidays rather than respite. These can be overnight get-aways, weekends or weeks away where we plan the activities with the individual and then ensure they get to choose how the holiday will be for them!
Transition Program: Also known as Living and Learning. We have developed this program in consultation with familise and it aims to ensure that wherever people can be occupied increasing their skills we need to assist them to do this. So we look for community partners for volunteer as well as casual work that we can support people to undertake with a view to continued skills development.
Children’s Program: This is to provide some friendly fun with a learning element for school aged children. We primarily run these programs after school and during the school holidays. Activities are carefully coordinated to ensure safety and appropriateness to all participants but include cooking, art, swimming, nature activities, sports and visits to facilities in and around their community.
Young Adults Program: This program is designed for people of school leaving age until… well, whenever. We don’t work on ages, but on life stages, so we have some really active Young Adults in their 50’s as group participants. We focus on skills development, learning through routines, social and networking activities and healthy relationships.
We go to the theatre, football games, basketball, movies, out to dinner, we run skills courses and healthy living programs which incorporate smart shopping, cooking, eating weight management and exercise. Group members choose and plan (including budgets and invitations) for all their activities.
The Hangout is a place where people can meet up with mates before going out, we offer various activities on different days, and we have visiting service partners from Townsville.
Flexi Holidays is a service for anyone who needs a little additional support to have a holiday. Sometimes we can arrange a holidy with Commonwealth funding, but mostly we have people who save up to come. We work closely with the public trustee as we have many joint clients. Check out our FLEXI HOLIDAYS tab at the top of our website.
Please fossick on through this website – you will enjoy it!
We are proud of our name – we are FLEXIBLE!
The beginnings of ‘Flexi’ are firmly in the community of the Burdekin Community decades ago, where parents of children with disabilities came together to garner support and ideas and try to draw some funding into the community.
With the support of each other, the parents lobbied and talked and lobbied some more and eventually, with the assistance of the Burdekin Community Association Inc, received funding for a respite service for the region including the Bowen community.
This was very exciting and in fact so successful was the organisation in the early days, that the Bowen part of the Service became incorporated in their own right and is now known as the Bowen Flexible Respite Service.
There was, at the time, a big argument with the government of the day. The politically correct ‘thing’ was to not fund centre based respite, and the community was determined to make sure that this form of respite was part of a suite of services that were offered to parents, families and people.
Having received funding for the service the community raised the funds to buy a centrally located block of land and built two units for a respite centre.
As the service grew so did their administration – eventually moving into one of the respite units and then in 2010 when they outgrew that building – the service moved into the current offices.
We now have a number of properties. In order to give our residents a real sense of security, we decided to buy two houses and with sufficient funding from the Department of Communities for 24/7 support, we opened our doors and our hearts.
In late 2010 we moved our administration from one of the Respite Units into the current building in Ross St. How wonderful it has been to have so much ROOM!!!
The Respite Centre has been returned to allow overnight support again as well as providing a Hangout – a place where we meet, plot and plan activities and generally collapse after a hard days work! On the property, we also have a fully self-contained unit which we also use for respite – except we don’t like the word ‘respite’. We have weekend sleepovers, or holidays or whatever.