The National Readiness grants for the NDIS program of Information, Linkages and Capacity Building (ILC) were announced on Monday April 30th, with $28m given out to organisations for a range of programs.

These grants are separate to the direct supports the NDIS provides to participants are intended to ensure that people with disability who do not have direct supports can more effectively live their lives and be active members of the community.  There are, according to NDIS estimates, approximately 4.3 million people with disability, and somewhere in the range of 470,000 people will recieve direct funding.  The remaining people, somewhere around 3.8 million people, will only be helped by the programs that the NDIS funds through ILC grants.

There are approximately 500,000 people with Acquired Brain Injury in the community, and the NDIS estimates that at the completion of the NDIS rollout, there will be approximately 14,000 people with ABI receiving direct supports. Therefore, most people with ABI will not get direct supports, and it is critical that sufficient ILC funding is directed to this group to ensure their goals, and indeed the NDIS goals, are met.

However, in the round of ILC funding just released, less than 1% of the funding is directed to helping people with ABI, when people with ABI make up nearly 12% of the people with disability who do not get direct supports.