Our Purpose & Guiding Principles
Our Purpose
Way Forward is a person-centred organisation that seeks to understand the lived experiences of the people we support to help them get back to financial stability. Way Forward is committed to long-term, free support so people have the strategies they need to continue to manage their finances independently. We do this in three ways:
Help
Help our clients understand and manage their financial situation by working through a realistic budget.
Advocate
Advocate on behalf of our clients to establish affordable, long-term arrangements with their creditors.
Manage
Manage payments for our clients who make one regular payment to Way Forward, which is then distributed to creditors.
For our clients, this means a realistic and manageable path towards a debt-free life.
Our guiding principles
Way Forward’s guiding principles were developed when we began our journey as an organisation. They were formed in collaboration with industry representatives, including community organisations as well as hardship teams of major banks. Since then we’ve grown and the guiding principles have continued to evolve with us.
The number one aim remains: that our clients must be better off by engaging with us and that every decision we make needs to start with the best interest of our client. Our remaining guiding principles are a consolidation of what we are trying to achieve and how we aim to get there.
Better off clients
At our core, everything we do at Way Forward should make our clients better off. This means the way we operate and treat clients must always start with the individual – treating all clients equally and without judgement regardless of why they’ve landed at Way Forward.
Supporting our clients by empowering them to remain in control of their finances is what we do – but we do it with kindness, consideration and devotion to pursue the best outcome for each client we support.
Simple, easy and reliable service
Unmanageable debt is far from simple, so it’s critical Way Forward delivers a service to clients that is simple, easy and reliable from the moment they pick up the phone to the moment they pay the last debt repayment and move onto their new debt-free lives.
This requires relentless focus on fine tuning our operations, constantly testing, learning and shifting our model, listening to feedback and training our team – so we offer the best version of Way Forward, each and every day.
Organisational independence
Every year our industry cooperation becomes deeper but our operations always start with independence. This is the only way we can keep focused on our clients’ best interest, now and in the future.
