National Partnership

• The recognitions add to several others recently awarded to Sun Life U.S., including top workplace awards from the Boston Globe (our sixth year), Hartford Courant (our third year), Baltimore Sun (our first year) and Top Workplaces USA (our third year).
• Sun Life has also received several workplace recognitions around supporting women, including appearing annually on the Bloomberg Gender Equality Index.
• Other Sun Life U.S. recognitions include a Best Employer for Diversity 2023 by Forbes and 15 continuous years with a 100% score on the Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index.
• Globally, Sun Life has committed to gender parity at VP level positions and above by 2025.

• WASHINGTON , Dec. 28, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The National Partnership for Child Safety (NPCS), a quality improvement collaborative with a mission to improve child safety and prevent child maltreatment fatalities, provided its year end update on partnership activities related to strengthening families and promoting safety science and innovations in child welfare.
• The National Partnership for Child Safety shares efforts to support families & promote safety science in child welfare.
• "Working together to integrate child safety approaches, we hope to reduce the number of child fatalities and near fatalities, decrease repeat maltreatment, improve workforce retention, and decrease racial inequities across child welfare systems."
• Media Notes: To request an interview with a spokesperson for the National Partnership for Child Safety, please contact Jennifer Devlin at 703-966-3241 or [email protected] .

• And what needs to be done to ensure houses in remote communities do not just meet the legal standard, but exceed it?
• Read more:
  No back door for 5 years: remote community's High Court win is good news for renters everywhere

Big result, but ongoing problems

• By the time the High Court decision was handed down in 2023, both lead applicants had died.
• Just as remote housing tenants must wait prolonged periods for repairs, the lengthy delay for housing justice outlasted them.
• However, a right to seek compensation for distress and disappointment is not a silver bullet for housing justice.

When your landlord is the government

• The NT government has not always been responsible for remote community housing.
• Most remote communities are located on Aboriginal land owned under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976.
• Through the NT Intervention, the Commonwealth government compulsorily acquired five-year leases over entire communities.

Current programs falling short

• It aims to prioritise cyclical and preventive maintenance to improve the quality of houses as well as health outcomes for tenants.
• If implemented effectively, Healthy Homes can improve housing hardware and increase the lifespan of existing housing.
• An evaluation of Healthy Homes found the average maintenance spend per house to be about $6,000 per year.

NT government datasets cannot distinguish between preventive and responsive maintenance
reporting requirements mean maintenance data is unreliable for determining how quickly repairs were undertaken
a significant proportion of maintenance work is coded miscellaneous, meaning it is not possible to determine the proportion of works by trade type.
The combination of these factors makes it very hard to assess whether and how approaches to remote community maintenance might be improving.

Bringing remote housing up to scratch

• So a High Court case has reaffirmed the rights of Santa Teresa tenants and the current remote housing maintenance program is inadequate.
• The National Partnership for Remote Housing Northern Territory expired in July 2023.
• Read more:
  Aboriginal housing policies must be based on community needs — not what non-Indigenous people think they need

  Federal funding of remote housing is required into the long term.

• Liam Grealy receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, and the NT Department of Territory Families, Housing and Communities.
• Kyllie Cripps receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Australian Government and State Governments to conduct research and evaluations.

• Skip Expands Retail and Gift Offering Ahead of the Holiday Season in National Partnership with Edible Arrangements.
• Skip is excited to announce their national partnership with gifting authority, Edible®.
• "We are excited to be expanding our retail offering, with the national launch of Edible across the Skip network," says Rachel MacAdam, Vice President, Marketing at SkipTheDishes. "
• We're happy to be able to show our appreciation for our customers, and be there for them whenever they need Skip, no matter the occasion."