Catalyst Education is a leading private provider of vocational education and training (“VET”) with a focus on key social sector skills including early childhood education and care, aged care and disability care, and although predominantly Victorian-based, has a growing presence in New South Wales.
We invested in Catalyst Education with a view to building a transformative leader in VET with a focus on key social sectors. With its impressive reputation, strong values-aligned management team and market-leading position in Victorian early childhood training, we saw Catalyst Education as the perfect entry point to build from.
The social impact thesis and theory of change behind the Catalyst acquisition is compelling; Significant skills shortages in the sectors that Catalyst specialises in (early childhood education and care, aged care and disability care) both in terms of absolute quantity, as well as quality of incoming employees, provide a major opportunity for impact additionality by scaling Catalyst’s existing high-quality offering and delivering employers work-ready graduates that ultimately result in better care outcomes for our nation’s most vulnerable people.
estimated aged care workers required per year over the next decade to meet basic standards of care
estimated new early childhood educators needed over the next 5 years to meet basic standards of education
estimated shortfall in aged, disability, nursing care staff by 2050
of Australians in residential aged care live in understaffed homes
…of care sector workforce shortages and instances of poor training standards driven by funding structures that incentivise providers to deliver the bare minimum…
…our most vulnerable Australians (the young, the elderly and the disabled) are frequently not receiving a standard of care that they deserve…
…excellent training for Catalyst Education’s Learners, while concurrently advocating for improvements in standards and further professionalisation of the care sectors…
…improved skills and career progression for our Learners and Staff, while providing care sector employers with graduates that will fill their significant skills shortages…
…a more adequately equipped workforce and ultimately clients experiencing excellent, ongoing high quality care.
Tender Loving Cuisine (TLC), a privately owned company established in 1995, initially focused on delivering meals to discharged hospital patients but has since shifted its emphasis to Home Care and National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) clients. Its primary clientele comprises Home Care Package (HCP) recipients, aiding elderly individuals in maintaining their independence at home rather than transitioning to residential aged care.
The company prioritises customer satisfaction by designing frozen ready-to-eat meals, managing the ordering process and customer service, while manufacturing, logistics, and last-mile delivery are outsourced to its partners. TLC primarily serves HCP, Commonwealth Home Support Program (CHSP), Managed Service Providers (MSP), and NDIS clients in the Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland, while also catering to non-government funded customers.
In April 2024, For Purpose Investment Partners (FPIP) acquired TLC through FP Ability Pty Ltd (FPAbility), its Disability Services platform. TLC complements FP Ability’s existing portfolio company, Able Foods. The strategic acquisition bolsters FP Ability’s presence in a growth market with quality products that support customer health and wellbeing.
We are focused on our intended impact of balancing nutrition and choice by increasing access to high-quality meals that will improve the health outcomes for vulnerable Australians including elderly people and people living with disabilities.
Eating nutritious food has a clear impact on health outcomes, and choice over meals is incredibly important for people to have control over how they live.
The key to balance these priorities is through menu design that provides a diverse range of options, where all items, even the traditionally ‘unhealthy’ ones (such as desserts) are nutritionally balanced.
In our first construction loan for the development of under-utilised church land, we partnered with the Sustainable Development Group (SDG) and the Anglican Church Growth Corporation to build three state of the art designed homes for 8 NDIS participants in Sydney’s northern beaches.
These homes will be built in Beacon Hill on land owned by the Anglican Church Growth Corporation, providing 6 High Physical Support and 2 Fully Accessible places to participants.
The demand for SDA accommodation in metropolitan areas is underserved, particularly in a market environment where land values are high and continue to rise. In partnering with SDG, a values-aligned NFP organisation, we were able to access excess land in a metropolitan area to provide tenants with accommodation closer to family support, better amenity to services and the community and avoid upfront land costs.
Casa Capace is the SDA provider of these homes, which are architecturally designed to enable quality living for Australians requiring specialist accommodation to live in innovative and adaptable homes to suit participants’ changing needs.
Luson is a boutique residential aged care provider in Victoria, operating 305 beds across two homes in the Geelong area and one in Clyde North. Luson also has a site in Rowville with development approval for another residential aged care facility. All three of the existing facilities have been either built or significantly refurbished in the past five years, and all contain only single-bed ensuite rooms.
The Luson team, lead by CEO Nick Yannopoulos have demonstrated a track record of performance, consistently achieving occupancy of over 95%, including throughout the Victorian COVID-19 waves of 2020/21.
We acquired Luson because we believe that a scale, social purpose aged care organisation run with business discipline can transform the aged care sector, much like Goodstart transformed early learning given the similarity in characteristics between the sectors (highly fragmented, with a significant not-for-profit / family-owned footprint).
We are acquiring Luson through a not-for-profit holding company, similar to the structure we used for the Catalyst Education transaction – this will enable Luson to better attract and retain staff through salary packaging and other employment benefits, and importantly, give residents comfort that their quality of care is the number one priority.
FPIP’s near-term focus it to optimise the existing assets and build out the management team before turning our attention to the growth strategy including the Rowville development and further acquisitions.
Able Foods is Australia's leading specialist meal delivery service for NDIS participants. It provides Australians living with disability with access to high quality nutritionally-balanced meals, with exceptional service and delivery tailored to each customer's specific needs.
Every Able Foods meal is designed by dieticians and abides by strict portion and calorie control requirements. Able Foods also offers individualised solutions including goal setting, meal plans, meals support, clinical support and importantly, education to help customers develop healthier habits over the long term.
We acquired Able Foods because we believe as a built-for-disability meal provider, it delivers a superior service to competitors and generates better outcomes for customers. All components of its service are designed in a disability-friendly manner, with specialist trained customer support teams offering support over the phone for participants who require assistance, customer deliveries made to pre-selected accessible locations, easy to open packaging, and texture modified meal options for customers living with Dysphagia.
Our initial focus post-acquisition is to build out the executive team and systems infrastructure to ensure that the business continues to deliver great outcomes for customers while improving efficiency on tasks like ordering and payment processing. We hope to then grow the business over time to reach even more NDIS-participants, and will look to potentially push into adjacent sectors such as at home care.
BlueCHP Housing is a disability accommodation partnership with NSW-based Tier 1 Community Housing Provider BlueCHP. This partnership builds on BlueCHP's experience gained from the Hunter Residences Program, the single largest SDA project since the creation of the asset class.
We partnered with BlueCHP due to their strong values-alignment and unique focus on tenant-led SDA development. BlueCHP builds a pipeline of prospective tenants through multiple avenues, and then works with these prospective tenants to see if they can provide them with their desired housing solution in their preferred location based on the available SDA payments and ensuring an acceptable return threshold is met.
We believe the tenant-focused approach is not only more impactful than traditional “build it and they will come” approaches, but it also provides us with sticky tenants who are more likely to view the property as their home for life.
BlueCHP Housing is also focused on the underserved Robust category of SDA, a category representing a cohort of people living with complex behavioural disabilities that has seen less supply due to structurally lower expected returns to investors. We are able to support this cohort without sacrificing on risk-adjusted returns through occupancy de-risking through the tenant-focused approach, as well as access to low cost, long term senior debt through federal government housing bond aggregator NHFIC (who are making their first ever investment into SDA as part of this transaction).
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We partnered with Liverty Housing (previousliy known as Summer Housing) on behalf of capital partner the Paul Ramsay Foundation and alongside The Impact Fund (“TIF”) managed by Conscious Investment Management (“CIM) to purchase 72 specialist disability accommodation (“SDA”) apartments in 7 properties. Since July 2020, our capital partner has committed $20.7m (of total $41m) in capital.
Supply of new housing to meet demand for disability accommodation continues to grow since the creation of SDA and its associated contracted payments under the NDIS in 2016. However, despite these incentives, the residual SDA supply shortfall at ~12,000 places remains significant.
Some operators entering the market are focused on maximising profit by meeting bare minimum standards to receive the SDA income stream. As a mission-driven not-for-profit, Liverty’s developments are of the highest quality which we believe will drive ongoing strong demand and lower than industry average vacancy rates. We believe that this focus on quality will enhance, not detract from financial returns as a result. Their model of accommodation (top quality 1/2 bedroom apartments) is strongly aligned with the NDIS philosophy of independence (i.e. vs. group homes).
For Purpose Investment Partners acknowledges and pays respect to the past, present and future Traditional Custodians and Elders of this nation and the continuation of cultural, spiritual and educational practices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
We believe that diversity, equity and inclusion at For Purpose Investment Partners are critical in our efforts to create significant social impact. Diversity in the team allows us to better represent the diversity of thought and experiences of the communities that we are aiming to serve, promotes a healthy and thriving working environment, and delivers innovative and sustainable outcomes for our communities, our people, our investors and our partners.
