An Important Notice from Lively

It is with mingled sadness and pride that we announce that at the end of 2025, Lively will be closing its doors, after ten years of life-changing programs.

For the past decade, Lively has brought together older and younger people to support one another, developing a new entry-level employment model that enables young people to support, connect with and learn from older community members. We are immensely proud of a decade of impact, with 2025 our biggest year so far as we supported almost 1,000 older people through our in-home and community tech help programs, which expanded to include tailored offerings for speakers of Mandarin, Vietnamese and other languages.

The need for our programs has never been greater. As the aged care sector struggles to meet workforce shortages and realise the community and government’s expectations for person-centred care, Lively attracts hundreds of applications every year from big-hearted young people who are eager to provide flexible, relationship-centred support and companionship. We believe as much as ever that the Lively model offers a powerful contribution to a more positive, life-affirming aged care system

However, facing an increasingly challenging funding environment and systemic barriers to grow our model in the aged care sector as it operates today, we have reached the difficult conclusion that we can no longer sustain our work.

Our top priority now is ensuring that our members and our Helpers are looked after, and we are making every effort to minimise the impact of this change on the young and older people who are part of our community. To ensure that our learning lives on, we are also working with Good Flock, a national initiative working to shift how Australia thinks about ageing. We encourage anyone who is keen to draw on our insights to reach out to Good Flock.

This moment prompts many emotions for our team: deep sadness about the end of high-impact work; pride in a decade of nurturing intergenerational connection; concern for the wellbeing of our team and community; frustration with the barriers thrown up by an innovation-stifling aged care sector; gratitude for the many people and funders who have given us a leg up along the way.

But good ideas never disappear; they just change form. We trust that, with thousands of people now having glimpsed the potential of this good idea dreamed up ten years ago, the seeds of something new and beautiful already exist within each of us touched by it.

We’ll be waiting to see what will bloom next.

*In-home services conclude 28 November and Community Tech Help sessions conclude 12 December.